Like a car alarm that goes off every time a noisy motorcycle drives by, alerts within IT operational teams cause irritation and work overload. While not every alert signifies something important, the challenge continues to be separating the trivial from the top priorities.

Since its founding is 2014, OpsRamp Inc. has been on a mission to simplify and transform IT operations by controlling the chaos of modern digital infrastructure using a service-centric, AIOps-driven platform. Its value proposition is simple: Leverage an operations management solution to make the business as a whole better.

“Imagine if you knew that your IT operations team could be more proactive and productive about alerts, incidents and insights from infrastructure monitoring,” said Jordan Sher (pictured), vice president of corporate marketing at OpsRamp. “What that means is you are free to create any kind of digital customer experience that you would want to drive value back to your end user. By consolidating everything down to one SaaS-based platform like this, it frees up the business to innovate and take advantage of new technologies. That’s the promise of OpsRamp.”

Sher spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in advance of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. They discussed how OpsRamp helps IT organizations cope with operational complexity, the role of AIOps in streamlining work tasks, providing mean time to value, and the firm’s support integration with Amazon Web Services Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

Dealing with complexity

The operational issues that OnRamp is addressing are not to be underestimated. Enterprise IT is burdened by complexity, and one survey found that 74% of chief information officers said it would soon become extremely hard to manage infrastructure performance.

A global pandemic and the mass move to remote work have placed additional burdens on IT organizations as businesses of all sizes were forced to adopt new tools to support employees and customers alike.

“With the move to remote work, the adoption of a lot of different digital tools and the creation and implementation of a lot of digital customer services have forced the enterprises we serve to rethink how they provide flexibility and control to their larger enterprise IT teams,” Sher said. “How can they consolidate infrastructure as it gets more and more complex?”

For OpsRamp, automation provides a key part of the answer. The company built its SaaS-based platform around an AIOps model, which provides a user interface to discover assets within the IT environment and automate the configuration process.

The AIOps platform includes monitoring capabilities for Kubernetes clusters and containerized workloads.

“OpsRamp is a big data platform at its core,” Sher said. “You bring OpsRamp in and optimize it for your overall infrastructure mix, and then the data gets fed into the AIOps feature functionality across the board. That means that the insights being driven by the OpsRamp AI platform are more sophisticated and they ultimately drive better insights than sticking a tool on top of five different existing data warehouses or data lakes.”

Providing business flexibility

A central part of the OpsRamp value proposition involves improving mean time to value. The company offers IT process automation capabilities, which can be triggered by alerts or updates, along with a bot to recommend automation workflows.

“Mean time to insight is one of the critical aspects of our product roadmap,” Sher noted. “We really want to drive down that time to value coefficient, because it’s what these IT operations teams need as complexity grows. One guiding light of OpsRamp is to equip the operations team with the tools they need to move flexibly with the business.”

Being able to move nimbly within an existing business model becomes even more important in an era when developers can access AWS and spin up a host of services with just a credit card. OpsRamp must walk a careful line between making sure that developers have access to the compute resources they need while maintaining an ability for the IT organization to manage those in the overall structure.

“We want to empower them to spin up that AWS service, but at the same time we want to just know that it exists and be able to control it,” Sher explained. “There’s a lot of AWS certified professionals who work at OpsRamp who understand what AWS is doing and who consistently introduce new features that play well with the service library that AWS currently offers today.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event on September 22. (* Disclosure: OpsRamp Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither OpsRamp nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE