Improve Efficiency, Reduce Risk: Latest BMC AIOps Innovations and Future Vision

Mike Vizard: Hello, everybody. I’m Mike Vizard and we’re back at Six Five On the Road in Las Vegas at the BMC Connect event and we’re here with my friend Kiran and we’re going to be talking about AIOps because well it is all the rage these days. Kiran, welcome to the show.

Kiran Diwakar: Thank you so much, Mike.

Mike Vizard: We’ve been talking about AIOps for some time now and I guess my question is it’s been a journey. Sometimes people got excited about it, but then there was hits and misses. Where are we right now in the maturity of the concept?

Kiran Diwakar: So I think we are definitely at a point, Mike, where it’s starting to get real. It’s starting to get real where customers are seeing value out of it, real business outcomes. Some of our customers last week in Stockholm talked about reducing their incidents by almost 85% compared to just six months back. We are seeing customers who are able to reduce the time it takes them to respond to an incident significantly. In the morning, I’m not sure if you saw Ali talk about it’s now taking from months just too few minutes to be able to get changes done in the environment. All of that is AIOps and I think I said, it’s exciting times. There’s still some way to go as we mature it and completely industrialize it, but I do feel we are doing a great job there and BMC’s up top there in that area.

Mike Vizard: There’s an old AI joke about it’s one thing to be wrong, it’s another thing to be wrong at scale. You guys have brought out some new tools that kind of help me figure out what the risk is for change. So walk us through that.

Kiran Diwakar: Absolutely. So what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve here? With DevOps and a lot of automation going in there, customers organizations are making changes to their production environments, sometimes hundreds of times a day. It’s a long, laborious task, but the same time, it’s very risky as well because if you see, more than two-thirds of outages that you typically see in customer environments are because of an incorrect change that was triggered, whether scheduled or unscheduled. So what does change risk advisor within our AIOps tool do today? AIOps is getting data, not just about metrics, about events, about services, but it’s also getting information about incidents, all the tickets that are out there. So we’re doing two things with our change risk advisor. Number one, looking at the service management data.

So what kind of changes were similar to this change that has been submitted? That’s number one. What was the outcome of some of these changes? Did these changes fail? Did they cause any downstream effect for the services that they are managing? So that is one element of it. Now what is AIOps bringing to table is a dynamic service model. So we are able to map the CIs, both the hardware assets as well as the software CIs, into a business service model and give a view to the user of what is the context. So your server is connected to a network device, the network device is connected to a edge router, and so on and so forth. But what we’re able to do is, once you get a change request, we are able to map the change for the CI onto the service model and then you’re able to determine what will be the business impact of that change. So not only are you looking at the past data, historical data, but now you are looking at the potential real-time impact to a service.

So we have had scenarios in our pilot customers where three changes are affecting the same service at the same time. We were able to uncover that as part of our beta testing. Now what does this mean? Those are risky changes. We would want to take some time, assess those, maybe get them through a cab, and then approve them. There might be simpler changes which are just not as risky and then you could just automate that and improve the speed of how changes are made to the environment. So that’s what we’re trying to get to, both the historical element as well as the context of the business service there, Mike.

Mike Vizard: If I happen to take out a service, will you tell me how much it will cost the business? I mean is there like a dollar or something that goes with that?

Kiran Diwakar: So that’s what we’re trying to now get to, mapping service ops, which is what is, as an example, what is the SLO associated with a particular service? Now if there’s an impact to the service, today with AIOps we are able to tell the technical impact to that service. With this service ops concept and AIOps bringing services together, we are able to say, “Oh. This service is a top service, your checkout service. If this gets impacted, you are going to lose probably five million dollars a day if you’re not able to fix that in time.” So we are trying to bring the revenue element to this as well.

Mike Vizard: So eventually service ops and FinOps will all come together under AIOps?

Kiran Diwakar: Yes, absolutely. So there’s an element that is not in the current release, but we are working on, from a roadmap perspective, a cost optimization. So today we are able to pinpoint that a particular infrastructure could run into a capacity problem in some time. So we’re able to do that. Now we’re trying to take it to the next level. Would we be able to recommend to the users, “Okay. This is the kind of CPU scale you should use for this application. This is the memory size you should use. This is which cluster should that application run on?” So we’re trying to get to more levels of specificity that would enable us to do a lot of cost optimization, FinOPs as you call it as well, Mike. So again, the gamut of use cases that now we are getting to because of the data being at one place, it’s phenomenal. It’s amazing. I’m very excited. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, but I’ve never been more excited about this before.

Mike Vizard: I feel like we’ve made a turn here. Last year it was all like fear and loathing of AI and, “I’m concerned about my job.” This year I talked to folks and they’re like, “I wouldn’t want to do this job without AI. It’s too tedious. It burns me out.” And now they’re looking at it and saying, “These AI agents might be my best friend.” So have we kind of come full circle?

Kiran Diwakar: Absolutely, yes. And again, it’s not just, as I said, the agents on ground, but it’s the managers, the CIOs as well where we are seeing the change in stance as well where there was an element of worry or does this mean my team size reduces? Does it mean I need to let go of people? And what we have seen, and you might have seen some of the customer success stories as well, where yes, absolutely yes, you have been able to reduce the amount of effort, not necessarily the team size. We reduce the amount of effort going into solving those problems and now that effort, those people, are contributing to innovation, making sure that you’re getting new products, new services out to the market. So it’s absolutely true, Mike. Yeah.

Mike Vizard: Now one of the most stressful areas of any ops is security and you guys are now talking about vulnerability ops or VulOps.

Kiran Diwakar: Yeah. I mean I think not many people can see it for the first time. One ops. Yeah. So one clarification I think, I just wanted to call it out, and it is something we discuss internally as well. Our intent is not to be the top security tool in the marketplace with this capability. So what we are trying to do is we have operations manager as a persona. And what is our operations manager trying to do? The operations manager is trying to get all the relevant data that could impact the IT assets, the business services that they are responsible for. Now as we are looking at all the adjacent data, vulnerabilities, some of the security information, is a very, very natural extension to getting that data. So what we are trying to do, we are trying to get that data from Tenable, rapid tools, that have this data already.

So we are integrating with those tools, getting the data. Now what is the value that we are providing with this solution VulOps? Because of the service model that I talked about earlier, now we are able to take the vulnerability and map, “Okay. Vulnerability number one has impact on checkout service. Vulnerability number two has an impact on payroll service. So which service is more important?” So we’ll be able to assist our security colleagues, working closely with our operation colleagues, the SecOps world, where we are able to prioritize some of those vulnerabilities because the vulnerabilities are in hundreds, sometimes thousands as well. That’s first element. Second, using our HelixGPT, we are able to provide recommendations on how to fix some of those vulnerabilities as well, including generating codes. So we are able to generate Ansible or Perl code that the users can just automatically run and get some updates done as well.

Mike Vizard: All right folks. You heard it here, AIOps. It’s all about reducing everybody’s stress. You’ve been watching Six Five On the Road in Las Vegas. Kiran, thanks for being on the show.

Kiran Diwakar: Thank you so much, Mike.

Mike Vizard: All right. We have a ton of other episodes to check out. So by all means, go through that list because you’re going to have more great conversations like this. We’ll be back in a minute.