Adam Frank, a senior product manager for Moogsoft, said version 8.0 of Moogsoft Enterprise enables IT teams to aggregate alerts from multiple platforms in a way that enables machine learning algorithms to identify high-priority issues that require immediate attention.

Moogsoft accomplishes that goal using noise reduction analytics to better prioritize alerts, which are then surfaced via an automated topology visualization tool that makes it easier to identify the root cause of any issue, he said.

Version 8.0 of Moogsoft Enterprise adds integration with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Firelens services to ingest EC2 log files, the PagerDuty incident management platform and the Opsgenie incident management platform from Atlassian.

Moogsoft has also revamped its user interface and enhanced its Workflow Engine (WE) to ease the process of aggregating data from a variety of IT management platforms.

Even before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, IT organizations had been moving to embrace machine learning algorithms and other forms of AIOps to help manage increasingly complex IT environments. In the wake of the pandemic, Frank said it’s clear IT teams will be relying more on AIOps platforms. Many organizations simply will not be able to afford to maintain the current size of their IT teams, noted Frank. At the same time, resistance to adopting AI to manage IT is likely to decline because IT staff simply will not have the time to manually perform as many rote tasks as they do today.

In the meantime, the debate over AIOps continues to heat up. Incumbent providers of IT management platforms contend they already have collected the relevant data, so it makes sense to apply algorithms to data where it already resides. Providers of AIOps platforms such as Moogsoft contend that for AI to be effective at scale machine learning algorithms need to be applied to data that currently resides in multiple IT platforms. As such it makes more sense to apply machine learning algorithms to data that has been aggregated in a single repository.

Of course, machine learning algorithms will soon be pervasively applied throughout the IT landscape. The decision IT teams will need to make is which platform will ultimately serve as its primary control point for managing enterprise IT.

While some IT organizations may be tempted to postpone that decision in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Frank notes the pandemic has also highlighted the need to modernize IT management platforms that increasingly need to be accessed remotely. Legacy IT management platforms generally assumed the IT staff would be working on-premises. Moogsoft is designed to enable organizations to employ a virtual NOC that can be accessed more easily from anywhere.

It remains to be seen just how the management of IT will evolve in the weeks and months ahead. The one thing that is certain is the way IT is managed is never going to be the same again.