Which AIOps tool should I pick?.

As decision-makers in the IT segment, CIOs and management are constantly looking at new platforms and tools that can better align their teams outcomes with the overall goals of their enterprise. In 2021, where AI-led innovation is omnipresent in ITOps, this means making the critical choice of choosing the right AIOps tool for their requirements. But, how should they make this decision against the laundry list of options, and what should be the criteria they use for this? The answer is a two-fold examination. First, understand the nature of AIOps tools. Then, break down the list of your enterprise requirements. In this blog, we give a roadmap for you to do both.
AIOps Tool Analysis
AIOps tools in the current state are of two broad categories - Domain Centric and Domain Agnostic. 
Domain Centric: These tools focus on a particular domain of expertise like Application Performance Monitoring or Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics. These tools collect data from specific sources and have a certain expectation of the nature of the data. The AI algorithms used for these tools work based on these expectations in data patterns and are inflexible in handling other kinds of data. However, within this context, they are specialists that can deliver great value and immediate returns.
Domain Agnostic: These tools aim at the broader application of AI into all spheres of IT applications. They can integrate various data types like KPIs, logs, and traces from different contexts(ITSM, APM, etc.) into a single solution that can contextualize this information. For example, such a platform can show alerts related to a particular event and show the business impact of this event. These tools support a host of external integrations for data from different types of sources containing different KPIs. These tools use machine learning algorithms to create other machine learning algorithms that can analyze data in different contexts to support AI-driven analytics. Such tools are ideal for long-term value where the goal is to grow an AI-centric organization.
What AIOps tool does my enterprise need?
At this point, you must examine your enterprise through different lenses and how each type of tool affects you. The most important of these are IT maturity, Infrastructure Deployment, Resources, and Gaps. Let's go over them all individually.
Maturity : Let's face it - a highly mature organization is already using many tools in each of its problem domains. Most of the best tools in the market have already incorporated domain-centric AI in their offerings. However, suppose your enterprise wants to innovate beyond basic AI like event correlation and noise reduction. In that case, you have to look at domain Agnostic tools and begin creating a team that puts AI at the center of their DevOps culture. 
On the other hand, for a low-maturity organization, the question becomes one of the requirements. If the requirement is the long-term development of a team and culture creation, domain-centric solutions will not cut it. If the vision is to get quick results, fast domain-centric solutions are the way to go. 
Infrastructure Deployment: Modern, small enterprises that are entirely cloud-born can see fast time-to-value with domain-centric solutions. Larger enterprises with hybrid clouds, on-premise hardware, or a host of legacy software would be wiser to go for domain agnostic solutions. These domain-agnostic solutions can provide far more potential with wide integrations for complex use cases like patch deployments and incident auto-remediation.
Resources: Enterprises with large resources should invest in domain agnostic tools and train their teams to take full advantage of these tools. AIOps is also a cultural mindset. So training teams - whether developers, operators, testers, or the service desk - to understand how AI is used and applied makes them contributors to the AIOps transformation. This will pay the enterprise back manifold in greater efficiency and innovation in the long term.
Gaps: Gap assessment is critical for any management position. It is also the most critical question in AIOps tool selection. What are your enterprise's performance gaps? Are your teams failing to register growth in MTTRs despite AIOps tools? Is the service desk attrition a drain on resources while user satisfaction scores haven't changed? It is not just "Which of my metrics are lower than industry averages?" - it is also "Which of my metrics have not improved over the last two quarters?".
With that said, if your gaps are focused around specialized areas like ITSM and Service Desk only, naturally, a domain-centric application focused on L1 Helpdesk Automation  will be more useful. Similarly, if you have a single business service-based event noise issue, domain-centric AIOps tools would be more prudent. 
However, suppose your gaps are more advanced or nuanced - like failure to meet SLA criteria or ineffective compliance with internal ITIL frameworks. In that case, you should work with a specialized Domain-Agnostic AIOps partner that can work with you to design AI-enabled controls that have a larger scope of action. Most domain-centric tools, for example, handle use cases like patch automation with a large degree of standardization that makes them restricted to a standard known hosts and systems. A domain-agnostic tool can instead work on various systems and use specialized AI tools like deep reinforcement learning to react to different systems as a human would. The complexity of use cases is a strong deciding factor in favor of domain agnostic AIOps tools.
Finally, go for an AIOps vendor that provides as many out-of-the-box use cases and integrations as you need in your enterprise. This will ensure a quick time-to-value that can lay the groundwork for future AIOps innovation.
Algomox AIOps is a suite of domain-agnostic platforms that provide a wide range of applications in the ITOps sphere. To learn more about how these applications can fit your particular need, please visit our solutions page at www.algomox.com and www.algomox.com/aiops/