BigPanda today added generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to analyze incidents surfaced by its AI for IT operations (AIOps) platform.
Blair Sibille, field CTO for BigPanda, said Generative AI for Automated Incident Analysis leverages generative AI platforms based on the general-purpose large language models (LLMs) created by OpenAI.
The goal is to make it simpler for IT teams to discern the root cause of an issue by, for example, taking advantage of summaries of alerts enabled by generative AI to make it simpler for IT professionals of any skill level to understand what requires their most immediate attention, he added. Today, insights are lost in the sea of alerts that often inundate IT teams, Sibille noted.
BigPanda has been at the forefront of applying machine learning algorithms to automate IT operations management. Now, the company is incorporating external general-purpose LLMs to further augment IT teams, said Sibille.
As IT environments continue to be more complex, it’s becoming essentially impossible for IT teams to manage them at scale without relying more on automation. AI technologies take automation to another level, but they won’t eliminate the need for DevOps teams to manage IT environments, added Sibille.
BigPanda claimed generative AI capabilities will make it possible to reduce the amount of time required to resolve tickets by seven minutes each, with an accuracy rate of 95% during beta testing. Over time, those capabilities not only reduce mean-time-to-resolution but also reduce the level of toil that often conspires to burn out DevOps teams, said Sibille.
At the core of the BigPanda AIOps platform is a data lake capable of consuming data generated by multiple applications and systems. That data then provides the foundation on which machine learning algorithms are applied to surface insights.
It’s not clear how much generative AI will automate DevOps workflows, but in effect, more IT teams will be able to take advantage of having the equivalent of a DevOps engineer that they can query any time an issue arises using natural language, noted Sibille.
AI doesn’t mean that IT outages will be completely eliminated, but it does mean they will become a lot less stressful, he added.
Naturally, there’s a lot of speculation concerning the impact AI will have on DevOps. Some contend it’s only a matter of time before the entire software engineering process is automated. As those advances are made, the cost of building applications will effectively drop to zero. Others argue that AI will simply augment DevOps teams in a way that makes it simpler to manage IT at scale using either the same number or possibly even fewer engineers.
The one thing that is clear is that AI will soon be pervasive. DevOps teams should start evaluating today which tasks will be automated with an eye toward planning how DevOps roles will evolve as AI advances accelerate.