How HEAL Can Help You Manage Service Incidents Better

Service incidents are unavoidable in today’s complex and dynamic IT environments. They can cause significant disruption to business operations, customer satisfaction, and revenue.

However, many organizations are still struggling to manage service incidents effectively. Here, we will explore some of the common challenges faced by ITOps team and how HEAL, an AI-powered tool, can help conquer them.

Incident Management: The Current State

According to a recent survey conducted by Microsoft, service incidents are becoming more frequent and costly for organizations across the globe. Some of the key findings from the survey are:

• 66.5% of respondents reported an increase in service incidents that have affected their customers over the past 12 months – a 3.6% increase from 2022.
• 79.8% of the respondents who reported an increase in the frequency of service incident says it takes up to 6 hours on average to resolve incidents from the first alert to mitigating the issues.
• Nearly 73.9% of the respondents reported that the individuals responsible for reliability engineering are experiencing challenges while trying to resolve incidents.
• Downtime is putting organizations at risk of losing as many as up to $300K per hour on an average, according to 63% of respondents – a nearly 5% increase from the 2022 survey.
• Even with a defined incident management process in place, 71% of respondents still report it can take up to 30 minutes on average to get the right team members to get together to resolve the issue.

These statistics show that incident management is a critical and urgent issue that needs to be addressed by organizations of all sizes and sectors.

The Common Challenges

One of the main reasons why incident management is so difficult is the complexity and diversity of the applications and technologies involved. Modern applications use a mix of new and legacy technology, such as cloud, microservices, containers, serverless, and more. These applications generate a huge amount of data and alerts, which can overwhelm the reliability engineers and make it hard to identify the root cause of the incidents.

For example, one of our customers, a large financial institution, faced the following challenges in managing their service incidents:

• Their applications use new and legacy technology, yet they receive over 50K alerts per day, and still face frequent outages for some key internal apps.
• They use ServiceNow as a single source of truth, with 10+ existing monitoring tools, and an in-house built AIOPS solution processing alerts, yet they are not able to provide root cause analysis (RCA) for the incidents.

As a result, they must resort to the “brute force” method of deploying large amounts of resources hoping to find the root cause of the incidents. This is not only inefficient and costly, but also stressful and frustrating for the reliability engineers.

Some of the common challenges faced by reliability engineers in managing service incidents are:

• Too many monitoring tools working in silos, which create data silos and inconsistent views of the system state.
• Too many alerts and not enough diagnostic insight, which lead to alert fatigue and noise.
• Event formatting is not standard and different across applications and monitoring tools, which make it difficult to correlate and analyze the events.

The HEAL Solution

To help our customers overcome these challenges and improve their incident management capabilities, HEAL AIOPS solution is designed to help reliability engineers:

• Reduce the number and duration of service incidents
• Increase the accuracy and speed of root cause analysis
• Enhance the collaboration and communication among the incident response teams

HEAL works by ingesting, processing, and analyzing the data and alerts from various applications, such as monitoring tools, log files, metrics, traces, and more. HEAL then applies advanced AI techniques, such as natural language processing, machine learning, and knowledge graph, to correlate, rank, and enrich the events with contextual information. The interactive dashboard helps ITOps team to easily identify the root cause, event ranking, the recommendations, and the feedback.

The HEAL Benefits

With HEAL implementation, our customers have experienced significant benefits in incident management processes and outcomes. Some of the benefits reported by our customers are:

• ITOps teams started seeing less incidents to work on, as HEAL reduced the number of false positives and duplicates.
• ITSM incidents had clear root cause, as HEAL provided accurate and comprehensive RCA.
• Root cause was correlated across metrics and logs, as HEAL used multiple data sources and AI techniques to find the root cause.
• Incidents were matched with ITSM ticket closure data to find similarities in past to validate solution recommendations
• Events in incidents were ranked for ops teams to better focus on right issues, as HEAL used machine learning and event ranking algorithms to prioritize the events.

These benefits resulted in improved efficiency, productivity, quality, availability, and performance for the applications and services.

Service incidents are a major challenge for organizations in today’s complex and dynamic IT environments. They can cause significant disruption to business operations, customer satisfaction, and revenue. However, with HEAL, you can manage service incidents better and faster. HEAL can help reduce the number and duration of service incidents, increase the accuracy and speed of root cause analysis, enhance the collaboration and communication among the incident response teams.

Also read → Benefits of Using AIOps in ITSM

About HEAL Software

HEAL Software is a renowned provider of AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) solutions. HEAL Software’s unwavering dedication to leveraging AI and automation empowers IT teams to address IT challenges, enhance incident management, reduce downtime, and ensure seamless IT operations. Through the analysis of extensive data, our solutions provide real-time insights, predictive analytics, and automated remediation, thereby enabling proactive monitoring and solution recommendation. Other features include anomaly detection, capacity forecasting, root cause analysis, and event correlation. With the state-of-the-art AIOps solutions, HEAL Software consistently drives digital transformation and delivers significant value to businesses across diverse industries.