Achieving and exceeding the customers’ expectations for service is essential for businesses as they scale and compete. If this is true for your business, you also know that the speed and reliability of the network is critical to a successful customer experience. Business leaders in general and IT executives specifically identify four areas that may jeopardize the service experience.

• First and most obvious is functional specialization. Each operations team is specialized, sitting in operational silos. There is limited collaboration during incident identification and response.
• Second the systems are increasingly interconnected. Interdependent applications make determination of causation challenging and most would agree that this situation delays resolution time.
• Third, workflows are often highly reactive. This means that the customer experiences service degradation or absence of service and opens a trouble ticket. The trouble ticket kicks off a workflow to correct the problem without operations digging deep to understand the root cause. Even after resolution, the ability to make changes that will prevent that problem from occurring in the future is not possible.
• Finally, competitive businesses are of continuous innovation. Systems and applications are constantly updating but operations are unable to keep pace with change.

Professional organizations, like the Technology Management Forum, publish research offering a business process framework which identifies three process domains: customer, product, service. Using this framework organizations are able to execute on a simple mission:  KNOW about a problem, FIX the problem, BEFORE the CUSTOMER realizes there is a problem. ITSM solutions have matured over time and easily flag a problem, but to fix the problem you need more than the alert flagging the problem. You need to determine the root cause to quickly FIX the problem. When your process is enabled by an AIOps solution you have reliable access to the analyzed data – insights. AIOps closes the knowledge gap created by ITSM alone and flips the model from reactive to proactive. Integrating ITSM with IT Operations and specifically Network Operations Management tools solves for the most challenging part of the mission:  FIX the problem BEFORE the customer realizes there is a problem.

Cisco Service Assurance: Integrating ITSM with Network Operations Management

Maybe you have taken the first step and implemented an ITSM. Now you have plenty of current and historical data about your business applications, business services, infrastructure, and processes.  Unfortunately, data alone will not provide the insights you need to make decisions or support the automation required for service assurance. By implementing a domain agnostic AIOps like Vitria VIA AIOps,  you can leverage information from the ITSM and turn data into operational and business insights to make decisions faster and act.

Cisco Service Assurance combines Cisco Network Automation with Vitria VIA AIOps to do add value to the ITSM. VIA AIOps adds depth to the practice of service assurance in three ways:

• VIA OBSERVES across multiple layers of the enterprise ecosystem. VIA ingests, enriches and structure massive amounts of real time data faster than human inspection.
• VIA ANALYZES the data and is able to detect and correlate anomalies and alerts with the primary purpose to evaluate and prioritize actions.
• VIA identifies the likely cause, triggers alerts to responsible parties who confidently ACT to reinstate service or correct anomalies resulting from change or operator error

VIA AIOps for Cisco Network Automation enables network operations to detect failures early – BEFORE the customer experiences a service outage or complains about service degradation. This powerful combination lets you check the box on the steps you need to enable a fast and accurate response BEFORE the customer even realizes there is a problem. After implementing Cisco Network Automation with VIA AIOps

• Triangulates multiple alerts from the network, an application and the infrastructure indicating the same root cause problem
• Identifies root cause, key symptoms and affected population of a service-impacting issues.

With this analysis and automation you can

• Detect, triage, and mitigate negative customer impact caused by change management.
• Sustain optimal performance over time with dynamic adjustments made to performance baselines across billions of dimensions and metrics.
• Introduce new applications, hardware, or software upgrades without risk.
• Enable continuous innovation and deployment while limiting unintended and unexpected problems.

VIA AIOps for Cisco Network Automation works through the entire event pipeline from observation to analysis and action and enables intelligent automation across all layers of service delivery. VIA increases visibility, providing valuable insights – insights which will enable you to be more proactive  – even prevent service impacting incidents. Besides providing the best possible customer experience, operational costs are maintained, and staff is available to support onboarding new customers and new project implementations.