Talking CloudIQ: Now we’re talking APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability
Mon, 29 Jul 2024 11:52:18 -0000
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Introduction
I have written a handful of blogs as part of the Talking CloudIQ series. Starting with this blog, I will not be discussing CloudIQ anymore. Not because I don’t like it or because it went away, but because it’s been rebranded as part of the new Dell APEX AIOps suite and being enhanced with Generative AI. What was known as CloudIQ is now called APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability. Fear not, what existed as CloudIQ is still alive and well, and still supports the entire Dell infrastructure portfolio. It’s still available at no additional charge for assets under a ProSupport or higher contract.
The Suite
Dell APEX AIOps is an AI-driven observability and incident management software-as-a-service suite that helps to simplify IT operations. So, what is it really? It’s the integration of Infrastructure Observability, Application Observability, and Incident Management.
Why the change?
With the acquisition of Moogsoft in August of 2023, Dell expanded its AIOps based applications to include incident life cycle management. With the recent announcement of APEX AIOps at Dell Technologies World 2024, we have announced new functionality that provides full application stack observability. Through a partnership with IBM, Infrastructure Observability will integrate with IBM’s popular Instana application observability software-as-a-service, bringing application visibility directly into the AIOps Infrastructure Observability (formerly CloudIQ) user interface.
APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability
As mentioned, all the previous CloudIQ functionality is fully intact as AIOps Infrastructure Observability. It’s still the same AI-driven tool that provides for proactive monitoring of your Dell infrastructure. It provides system health, cybersecurity, and sustainability insights and recommendations. For example, AI algorithms provide health scores based on the status of a system’s components, capacity, performance, configuration, and data protection. There are also recommendations to fix issues impacting the system or to avoid potential issues that could impact future operations.
Soon there will be a generative AI tool, called AIOps Assistant in the Infrastructure Observability user interface. This will formulate answers to your queries about your Dell systems based on more than 133,000 knowledgebase articles, white papers, and more!
With webhook and REST API support, information from AIOps Infrastructure Observability can integrate with your other IT tools to allow for automated service tickets, escalations, CMDB updates, and remediation.
Figure 1. APEX AIOps Observability home page
APEX AIOps Application Observability
APEX AIOps Application Observability helps you optimize application performance to reduce risk, accelerate innovation, and increase productivity by delivering full stack observability integrated with your Dell infrastructure. The integration of application visibility into the Infrastructure Observability user interface allows you to see a full stack topology for each application: the application layer, the underlying Dell infrastructure, and the health status of each. This visibility enables you to determine whether issues impacting applications are originating from infrastructure or from the application itself and what to do about it. You can quickly see an at-a-glance view of your applications with their health and their “golden signals”: call rate, erroneous call rate, and latency.
Application Observability has integrated sensors that support more than 300 application layer technologies. These include cloud and virtualization platforms, operating systems, web proxies, cloud providers, data stores, messaging platforms, OSS collectors, mobile, and more.
Figure 2. AIOps Observability Application view
APEX AIOps Incident Management
AIOps Incident Management helps you optimize the availability of your entire infrastructure (Dell, non-Dell, and public cloud infrastructure) through AI-driven incident life cycle workflows. Incident management ingests data from Dell and multivendor IT tools and uses AI to reduce event and alert noise into single actionable incidents, identify root cause, improve collaboration, and automate remediation. This gives IT teams across silos a shared single pane of glass for examining the root cause.
It is pre-integrated with more than 100 popular third-party IT monitoring and management tools for data ingestion. AIOps Incident Management is also pre-integrated with many popular ITSM tools (for example, ServiceNow, Remedy, and JIRA) to initiate actionable service tickets, communication tools (including PagerDuty, Slack, Microsoft Teams) to provide notification and escalation, and automation tools (such as Ansible and Terraform) to initiate automated corrective action. With native integration with AIOps Observability Webhooks, another source of data from your Dell infrastructure is quickly integrated into AIOps Incident Management.
Figure 3. AIOps Incident Management Situation Room
Conclusion
While CloudIQ has been renamed as APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability, it maintains its highly regarded functionality, continues to expand its feature set, and is still available for your Dell assets under a ProSupport or higher contract. By integrating Infrastructure Observability with the Application Observability and Incident Management tools, the newly formed APEX AIOps Suite now provides full application stack visibility and incident management workflows. These enhancements give you visibility across the application and underlying infrastructure, the ability to alleviate alert sounds in a multivendor environment, identify root causes, and perform automated remediation. So while the Talking CloudIQ blog series is over, keep an eye out for my new series: Talking APEX AIOps!
Resources
How do you become more familiar with Dell Technologies and APEX AIOps? The Dell Technologies Info Hub site provides expertise that helps to ensure customer success with Dell Technologies platforms. We have infographics, solution briefs, and an APEX AIOps Suite demo available at the APEX AIOps page.
Also, feel free to reference the APEX AIOps Observability Whitepaper which provides an in-depth summary of Observability.
Interested in DevOps? Visit our public API page for information on integrating Observability with other IT tools using Webhooks and REST API.
Author: Derek Barboza, Senior Principal Engineering Technologist