UPDATED 12:22 EDT / SEPTEMBER 29 2021

APPS

OpsRamp bets on AI, automation to solve critical availability problem for modern business

As the digital transformation deepens, businesses have their applications increasingly distributed and complex, which, not surprisingly, results in service availability and performance issues. Still, software is more impactful to bottom line than ever, and keeping apps available to customers is critical.

Leveraging hybrid observability, machine learning and process automation, AIOps startup OpsRamp Inc. has been guiding companies to meet the challenges of providing availability in this modern world.

“When we talk about availability, we don’t just mean the four nines or an uptime metric,” said Michael Fisher (pictured, right), director of product management at OpsRamp. “Availability to the modern enterprise is really about an application doing what it needs to do to serve the users in a way that works for the business.”

Fisher and Jordan Sher (pictured, left), vice president of corporate marketing at OpsRamp, spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. They discussed the availability challenges facing modern businesses, how OpsRamp addresses these issues and the technology behind its AIOps platform. (* Disclosure below.)

APP aligned with business outcomes

The concept of availability is evolving along with technology advances. The traditional uptime idea does not address a key aspect of availability, which is performance, according to Sher. If a system is up but not performing well, then it’s not really available.

“Let’s take, for example, you get on Amazon. The Amazon e-commerce experience is always available, and what that means is that at any given moment when I want to click through the e-commerce experience, it performs,” Sher explained. “If there’s a latency issue, if the application has a lag, if it takes 30 seconds to really perform an activity on that application, in the alternative definition that’s not available anymore.”

An app available is also one that is business aware, according to Sher. This means being in line with enterprises outcomes, especially now “when applications are often the stock and trade of the business,” he added.  “And so, if you create an application that is not business aware, that is just there for its own sake or is not performing according to the revenue goals or the targets of the business, then it’s no longer available.”

Observe, analyze and act

To address this much broader concept of availability, OpsRamp takes on a three-pillar approach. The first piece is the ability to observe data. Companies must have the right data at any given point in time to accurately diagnose, assess, and troubleshoot application behavior, and many do not, because data is often siloed in many different teams, each with a slightly different understanding of application health, according to Fisher.

For example, the DevOps team might have an instance of Prometheus or some other monitoring tool, while the IT team might have their own set of tools. With this segmented view, companies aren’t really having the data in one central location to understand availability at a more holistic level, Fisher explained.

The second part of the availability approach is the analytics phase, which means knowing if the business has the proper intelligence on top of the data to generate meaningful insights for that operator and user.

“And the promise here is that: Can we understand that baseline performance and potentially even mitigate future instance from happening? How often do we hear a cloud provider going down or some SaaS provider going down because of some microservice migration issue or some third-party application or networking they’re relying on?” Fisher said.

Finally, there is the “act” pillar, which involves investments to correct the availability problem. As IT teams are increasingly having to do more with less, automation plays a key role.

“From a platform perspective, how do we enable teams to focus on the most business-critical tasks, which are your cloud migrations, adopting microservices to run your modern applications, innovative projects?” Fisher asked. “And maintaining availability is not something people want to do; that should be automated.”

Improving time to value is a central proposition

OpsRamp found out the main reason applications are unavailable is network issues. Oftentimes, a configuration that is not well thought out or a quality assurance issue — because the company didn’t have adequate controls in place — can cause some application servers to go down and cause cascading problems.

The way OpsRamp is solving this and other questions is basing its solutions on artificial intelligence. 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.

A central part of the OpsRamp value proposition involves improving mean time to value, according to Fisher.

“From my priority’s perspective, we’re really driving more focus on this time-to-value problem. It’s all an effort to make sure that when they hit our platform and they use our platform, we’re showing them their return on investment as fast as possible,” Fisher concluded.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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