Summary: 2021 Gartner® Market Guide for AIOps Platforms

Lisa Wells
Lisa WellsProduct Marketing
4 min read

StackState and AIOps

We are excited to be named a Representative Vendor in the domain-agnostic AIOps platforms market in the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for AIOps Platforms. We believe that this validates our unique approach to delivering an observability solution that accelerates your success in the cloud with:

  • End-to-end visibility of your complete topology

  • A one-of-a-kind versioned graph database that tracks changes in dependencies, relationships, and configurations over time to quickly identify the probable root cause of an issue

  • zero-configuration anomaly detector that identifies abnormal behaviour to prevent issues from happening

Read our summary of this Gartner research report, below.

What to Expect from the AIOps Market in 2022

If you haven’t noticed, AIOps is taking off. While not as googled (yet) as its DevOps predecessor, the term is seeing more and more print coverage and online searches

But its frequent name dropping in the press isn’t the most impressive part. Coined by Gartner in 2016, AIOps – which stands for artificial intelligence for IT operations – continues to grow and influence the broader IT Operations Market (ITOM). In 2020, AIOps had an estimated market size of between $900 million and $1.5 billion and a projected compound annual growth rate of about 15% between 2020 and 2025. 

With researchers predicting the value of the AIOps market to skyrocket, it seems like a good time to take a close look at the Gartner Market Guide for AIOps Platforms.

Understanding the AIOps market 

You already know what AIOps platforms are, but do you know where the market is going in the next few years? We believe That's where Gartner Market Guide for AIOps Platforms can come in handy, giving you useful insights into the direction and growth of AIOps. As a result, it helps you manage the risk of investing in an emerging market. 

Let’s start with the basics. According to Gartner, AIOps platforms are a great way for I&O leaders to “improve analysis and insights across the application life cycle in addition to augmenting IT service management and automation.” What’s more, AIOps platforms enhance a broad range of IT practices, including I&O, DevOps, SRE and service management.” “

Why AIOps?

Gartner maintains that “AIOps is not just a data storage and retrieval system” or a tool for doing “trend analysis, forecasting and the ability to query vast datasets.” At the highest level, AIOps is designed to “curate and enhance the quality of ingested data so I&O leaders can drive multiple use cases relevant to the appropriate practice or persona,” Gartner says. 

Let’s use pattern discovery as an example. Pattern discovery, Gartner says in its guide, can “help forecast emerging behavior, relationships across IT entities, and benchmarking behavior (of IT artifacts, users, and agents) to identify anomalies and provide relevant context to business owners.” What’s more,“Analytics also facilitates automated insights, eases root cause determination and enables automated actions for resolving identified issues”.

Where is the market headed?

Gartner believes the market is shifting to domain-agnostic AIOps, asserting that “the domain-agnostic platform is emerging as a stand-alone market, distinct from domain-centric AIOps platforms.” Why the move? Gartner says it’s because agnostic platforms provide “flexibility in ingesting increasingly diverse datasets across a progressive roadmap stretching from three to five years.” 

Not surprisingly, Gartner plans to focus its future Market Guides on domain-agnostic platforms. The reality is, “as more organizations look to move to domain-agnostic options, vendors focusing solely on domain-centric technology will find themselves left out of the market discussion,” the company says.

What’s driving growth?

Between I&O, DevOps, SRE and service management, AIOps platforms are spreading rapidly across enterprises. Meanwhile, the growth of digital business transformations and the move from reactive to proactive response issues are heavily influencing the adoption and direction of AIOps. As the market continues to transform, you are likely to see the emergence of more specialized capabilities, such as analytics and trained models embedded in devices.

AIOps is no longer in its infancy, but it has room to mature. That’s why Gartner stresses that “Although AIOps technology has existed for a number of years, successful deployments require time and effort, including a structured roadmap by the end user.”

What’s next?

Going forward, Gartner recommends that I&O leaders who focus on infrastructure, operations and cloud management areas should:

  • “Prioritize practical outcomes over aspirational goals by adopting an incremental approach that starts with replacing rule-based event analytics and expands into domain-centric workflows like application and network diagnostics.

  • Choose between domain-centric or domain-agnostic AIOps by allowing the use case to determine the approach. Use domain-centric AIOps features built into a monitoring tool for a one-off, specific use case, and deploy a domain-agnostic stand-alone solution with a roadmap straddling multiple use cases.

  • Enable task automation, knowledge management and change analysis by selecting an AIOps platform that supports bidirectional integration with ITSM tools. Beware of tools that provide only basic search-and-display capability.

  • Enable continuous insights across ITOM by supporting these three aspects of AIOps platforms: observe, engage and act.”

While AIOps has a long way to go, Gartner believes that AIOps will become an integral part of future IT operations. “There is no future of IT operations that does not include AIOps. This is due to the rapid growth in data volumes and pace of change (exemplified by rate of application delivery and event-driven business models) that cannot wait on humans to derive insights.“

Attribution & disclaimers:

Gartner, Market Guide for AIOps Platforms, Pankaj Prasad, Padraig Byrne, Josh Chessman, 6 April 2021

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