AIOps with Site24x7: Maximizing Efficiency at an Affordable Cost

The rise of complex applications and infrastructures has made it increasingly challenging for IT operations and DevOps teams to keep up with the demands of modern digital businesses.

Traditional monitoring tools, which rely on static thresholds and rule-based alerts, fall short in addressing the complexity and scale of today's IT environments. That's where AIOps comes in. AIOps, or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, is a new approach to IT management that leverages AI and machine learning to automate monitoring, alerting, and remediation.

In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at AIOps and explore Site24x7, an all-in-one monitoring solution that incorporates AIOps capabilities to help teams stay ahead of application and infrastructure issues.

We'll delve into Site24x7's Application Performance Manager (APM) and explain how it can help developers optimize the performance of their applications. We'll also compare Site24x7 APM with other popular APM tools like New Relic, Dynatrace, and AppDynamics.

Finally, we'll provide a case study on how to use Site24x7 to avoid outages in an AWS infrastructure and highlight the benefits of AIOps and Site24x7 for IT operations and DevOps teams.

AIOps Impacts on Operations and Monitoring

In the current IT landscape, AIOps is not merely a buzzword but a genuine need. The enormity of data generated by infrastructure elements such as logs, metrics, and events creates the most significant hurdle for IT teams.

AIOps can help process and analyze this data at scale, providing insights that might not be immediately apparent to human operators. AIOps can have a significant impact on operations and monitoring by automating routine tasks, improving efficiency and incident response time, enhancing data analysis, optimizing resource utilization, and increasing visibility and transparency.

Automating routine tasks

AIOps automates many routine tasks that are currently performed by IT staff, such as server reboots, thread dump executions, and starting/stopping VMs. This can help reduce manual labor, increase efficiency, and improve accuracy.

Improving efficiency and incident response time

AIOps can help identify and resolve issues faster, reducing downtime and improving system uptime. It can also help prevent incidents by identifying potential problems before they occur.

Enhancing data analysis

To process large amounts of data from various sources, including logs, metrics, and events, to gain insights and identify patterns that may not be apparent to human operators.

Optimizing resource utilization

AIOps enables optimizing resource utilization by analyzing usage patterns, predicting future trends, and making recommendations for resource allocation and capacity planning.

Increasing visibility and transparency

AIOps provides real-time visibility into the health of IT systems, allowing for better decision-making and faster response times.

AIOps Tools - Overview of Site24x7

Site24x7 is an all-in-one monitoring solution powered by AIOps, that offers comprehensive monitoring of internet services, user interactions, network devices, cloud costs, application experiences, and IT infrastructure for managed and cloud service providers. With over 13,000 actively paying customers and support for multiple locations, platforms, and integrations, Site24x7 is a choice to consider for a comprehensive monitoring suite for developers and engineers.

The platform offers different capabilities such as website, server, network and cloud monitoring, log management, and APM (Application Performance Management). Let’s take a look at some of these features:

Website Monitoring

Site24x7's Website Monitoring module provides deep insights into the uptime and performance of web applications and internet services from over 120+ global locations and within a private network. DevOps and SysAdmin teams can gain visibility into critical website performance metrics through powerful dashboards and alerts, enabling them to make instant decisions.

Site24x7 also provides network traffic monitoring (NetFlow) and network configuration management (NCM) from the same console.

Server Monitoring

The Server Monitoring module helps users can stay on top of outages and pinpoint server issues with root cause analysis capabilities. Site24x7 can monitor Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, VMware, AWS, Docker, Azure, GCP, and other cloud-hosted servers and applications to ensure optimal performance.

Cloud Monitoring

The Cloud Monitoring module provides a comprehensive insight into multiple public cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, and on-premises data centers powered using virtualization and HCI technology like VMware and Nutanix. With this module, users can optimize workloads for their hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Log Management

Site24x7's Log Management module aims to centralize log data for easier search and analysis. Users can aggregate Syslogs, and application logs, log data from text files from hundreds of VMs and application services, run interactive search analysis using a query language, and configure thresholds based on conditions or values to get alerted.

Network Monitoring

Site24x7 has a Network Monitoring module. This module comprehensively monitors critical network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, wireless, load balancers, WAN accelerators, printers, UPS, and storage. This module helps network teams get the deep performance visibility required to manage complex networks.

Application Performance Management

Another remarkable tool in the site24x7 suite is its Application Performance Management which gives developers a complete view of all key parameters that help them ensure optimum application performance. The APM supports apps built on Java, .NET, PHP, Node.Js, Python, and Ruby on Rails, running on Linux, Windows, containers, AWS & Azure environments. It also supports mobile apps developed on iOS, Android, and React Native. Users can gauge the application experience of real users in real-time by browsers, platforms, geography, ISP, and more to fine-tune performance.

How to Leverage AIOps with Site24x7's APM Tool for Proactive Monitoring and Automation

Site24x7 leverages AIOps to provide comprehensive monitoring for IT resources. By using Site24x7, developers can implement AIOps and gain proactive monitoring and alerting, root cause analysis, and automation. Additionally, the APM is a perfect tool for understanding the application components and background transactions.

According to the vendor, the application performance monitoring tool has been shown to deliver significant benefits to developers and IT teams, including a 94% reduction in response time, 96% fewer database calls, 78% fewer calls to external components, 90% optimization in SQL queries, and a 90% reduction in exceptions.

Proactive Monitoring and Alerting

The platform uses machine learning to detect anomalies and automatically trigger alerts when potential issues are detected. By analyzing vast amounts of performance data, machine learning algorithms can identify patterns and deviations from normal behavior using dynamic thresholds.

Root Cause Analysis

The APM tool provides code-level visibility, enabling developers to pinpoint the root cause of issues quickly. By identifying the source of issues, developers can optimize performance and prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.

Automation

The APM capabilities play an important role in enabling developers to automate IT processes, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving efficiency. For example, developers can automate incident remediation, reducing downtime and improving application availability. This is done by combining the APM with Site24x7 IT Automation.

How to Use Site24x7 to Implement AIOps

To add AIOps capabilities into your stack, developers can leverage the APM tool. The implementation is quick and straightforward:

Step 1: Install the Site24x7 Agent To get started, download and install the Site24x7 APM Agent on the servers running your applications. The platform provides agents for various languages and environments, including desktop, containers, cloud, serverless and mobile applications.

Step 2: Configure the Agent After installing, configure the license key, application name, port number, and proxy server details and allow communication to Site24x7 Servers through firewall rules.

Step 3: Start monitoring your application performance You can monitor critical metrics like Throughput, Avg response time, Apdex, and Errors, while also getting in-depth stack traces to quickly debug exceptions and slowness. You can also track the platform-specific metrics like JVM, IIS, etc to correlate any slowness. Additionally, Integrations with server monitoring and RUM will show underlying infrastructure and browser metrics to get a complete view of your system's performance.

Step 4: Set up Alerts and Notifications DevOps specialists can set up alerts and notifications. Site24x7's machine learning algorithms can detect anomalies and trigger alerts when potential issues are detected. Site24x7 automatically sets default alerts for critical metrics but can be customized according to business needs. Additionally, third-party integrations allow DevOps to stay notified on their channel of preference, and raise tickets in incident management tools, enabling the teams to stay ahead and resolve issues faster.

Step 5: Automate Incident Remediation Finally, you can automate incident remediation. For example, Site24x7 can be configured to automatically start/stop services, collect thread dumps to identify deadlocks or fetch heap dumps to track memory leaks, or even custom scripts that clear out temporary files when disk usage is nearly full.

Case Study: Avoiding Outages in AWS Infrastructure

One of the tools that businesses can use to monitor AWS health is the AWS Health Dashboard as it provides real-time insights into the status of AWS resources, services, and accounts. The dashboard notifies users of potential AWS resource performance or availability concerns and offers remediation advice. The main goal here is reducing the mean time to repair (MTTR).

Site24x7 offers an AWS Health Dashboard that provides a unified platform for viewing and identifying events and issues that affect AWS resources. The integration is performed using plugins.

Site24x7's AWS Health Dashboard monitor provides three monitors to view and identify the events and issues affecting AWS resources. The monitors allow businesses to track the availability of their resources and view the number of past health events based on categories such as region, services, and event type.

Another real benefit of using Site24x7 with AWS, in this case, is the AI-powered insights that allow businesses to predict future trends with historical analysis and contextualization. For instance, businesses can study the current disk and memory space and predict how much space these will occupy in the future. By obtaining similar predictions for all AWS service metrics based on historical observations, developers can easily implement preventive measures before issues arise, reducing the likelihood of outages and minimizing their impact.

Additionally, developers can configure thresholds and receive alerts for affected resources using Site24x7's IT automation feature.

The automation support provides predefined automation to common tasks:

• Reboot EC2 instances,
• Stop RDS DB instances,
• Reload DMS replication tasks,
• Publishing custom notification messages to SNS topics,
• Invoking Lambda functions
• Rebooting Redshift data warehouse clusters
• Sending data record to Kinesis Data Stream
• Sending emails using the Amazon SES API
• Starting a state machine execution
• Starting, stopping, rebuilding, or rebooting WorkSpaces
• Rebooting Neptune instances
• And more!

Final Words

Businesses must be able to respond swiftly to challenges that develop in their IT infrastructure in today's fast-paced world of technology. By automating essential IT operations and obtaining greater insights into performance data, organizations can keep ahead of possible problems using AIOps.

The all-in-one monitoring solution from Site24x7 provides comprehensive AIOps features, such as anomaly detection, IT automation, and NLP-based ChatOps bots, to help organizations stay ahead of possible issues and keep their systems running smoothly.

Businesses may reap considerable benefits from Site24x7's application performance monitoring tool, such as reduced response time, fewer calls to external components, and greater SQL query optimization. Likewise, integrating with other vendors like public clouds such as AWS may assist organizations in avoiding interruptions in their public and hybrid infrastructures and gaining real-time insights into the condition of their AWS resources and services.

Zoho’s Site24x7 pricing is competitive and affordable. Plans start from $9 USD per month with a 30 days trial period that you can try out here: https://www.site24x7.com/site24x7-pricing.html