“The way we work has changed forever.” Those are words that our CEO Jennifer Tejada used in her interview with Yahoo Finance a couple of weeks ago. Those words made me stop and think about how much of our customers’ daily work has changed irreversibly. Working from home has changed from a luxury to a necessity, so how do folks in the IT world adapt to this change?

As the scope of IT operations expands and becomes more complex, using machine learning to automate key workflows becomes not just an interesting concept but an actual necessity to keep up. Many companies will gravitate toward AIOps as the solution to this growing complexity problem. Artificial Intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is a category of tools that combines datasets, machine learning, and analytics to help ITOps teams resolve incidents faster and more efficiently.

From a category standpoint, AIOps broadly captures a large swath of vendors that use machine learning and algorithms to identify issues. Some of them even have remediation capabilities, but in practice, many vendors fail to leverage the insights and intuition that comes from IT professionals who have built careers on supporting the ever-changing IT landscape. The marriage between machine data and human data becomes the core underpinnings of what will make AIOps a more pervasive solution. As Nancy Gohring, Senior Analyst at 451 Research said, “Solutions that bring together event data, human response data, and machine learning to improve digital operations can help solve some of the problems that emerge in today’s complex service architectures.”

Today, PagerDuty is announcing a new partnership with IBM to connect the human and machine data that will provide a more powerful AIOps solution for our joint customers. By leveraging PagerDuty’s 350+ integrations and over 11 years of analytics on how customers respond to incidents, IBM Watson AIOps will be able to provide users with comprehensive insights on incidents that may be impacting IT, enabling them to take action in real time to resolve the issues. Together, PagerDuty and IBM Watson AIOps cut through the noise and help ITOps teams be more productive.

What Is IBM Watson AIOps?

IBM Watson AIOps is a tool that helps IT teams address a complex range of issues that they deal with on a regular basis. IBM does this by leveraging structured and unstructured data in real time so users have a holistic understanding of incidents. This “explainable AI” provides users with a holistic understanding of data, providing them with the knowledge they need to take quick, decisive action.

IBM also delivers full visibility across data sources, whether structured or unstructured. This, combined with their data science toolchain, lets users manage and govern how their AI is used in production.

Watson AIOps for PagerDuty

When an incident occurs, PagerDuty collects signals in real time from across your business—such as APM, cloud and infrastructure monitoring, and customer service data—and then filters out the noise and adds context. The resulting PagerDuty alert is then sent to IBM Watson AIOps, which uses datasets across the organization and leverages AI to enhance the knowledge about a particular incident. This “rich alert” can then be used to help SREs and incident management teams respond to incidents quickly, with full context.

In the image above, IBM Watson AIOps would engage during the “contextualize” stage to add even greater context to a PagerDuty alert, so teams can respond in a more informed manner.

Get started With IBM Watson AIOps for PagerDuty

If you’re a PagerDuty customer and interested in learning more about how IBM and PagerDuty are joining forces to automate ITOps, please contact sales@pagerduty.com.