As Digital Transformation gathers pace, IT infrastructure is getting horribly complicated. When something goes wrong, tracking down the cause is a nightmare – so many services, devices, suppliers and SLAs. Imran Hussain, Client Services Director, Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, BT, says: “It’s time for a smarter way to monitor and manage infrastructure.”
Service Intelligence is a managed service that aggregates performance data from any device in any location, using Big Data and Machine Learning technologies developed by BT.
The next step is using AI so we can not only diagnose and fix problems faster and more easily, but also see into the future and take pre-emptive action to avoid problems. Service Intelligence will help the digital enterprise deliver a consistently excellent user experience.
- What is Service Intelligence?
Service Intelligence is a new managed service based on Big Data and Machine Learning technologies. It acts as an aggregator of management data from any device and any location. It provides our agents with geographical and network topology views of our customers complete network solution, enabling them to visualise application flows and rapidly triage to a fault.
While the technology behind this advanced service, which allows us to ingest data from any management source, is unique, the real magic comes when we add our people and processes. The result is a managed service that means less downtime, reduced costs associated with fault management, rapid incident diagnosis and speedy resolution.
This new capability builds on our Dynamic Network Services programme, which is designed to give customers more choice, security, resilience, service and agility in the roll-out of future networks that support Digital Transformation. It’s one of the key tools available to our experts in the BT service Centre of Excellence to support customers’ adoption of SD-WAN and network functions virtualisation (NFV).
- Why do organisations need such advanced solutions?
Businesses are more connected than ever. Data volumes are mushrooming. Everyone has mobile devices and IoT is everywhere. The agility benefits of digital transformation are huge. But the shift of applications and services to the cloud and the evolution of new software defined networks to support this mean that many firms are running hybrid infrastructures that are becoming increasingly complex. When something goes wrong, it’s difficult to know where to start.
For example, typical business transactions may use an average of 80 different types of technology. Starting with a mobile device in an employee’s hand, a transaction may be processed by an app, and traverse through Wi-Fi, firewalls, a wide area network (WAN), software defined WAN (SD-WAN), cloud, more firewalls, servers, more software and so on, and all of this has to work perfectly or the app will fail. To keep track of all these components businesses may be using 10 or more tools for monitoring.
Furthermore, through this solution, we’ll be able to predict and prevent the future by using AI and Machine Learning technology. Millions of data points are now flowing to the IT operations team, but human capacity to handle data remains 100 data points per hour. Over 12 months, enterprises collected 88% more data than the year before. It’s an impossible task for a human being to understand what’s happening everywhere at once.
Overall, Service Intelligence provides:
- Real-time fault isolation – across your entire solution, not sequential testing
- A clear understanding of the impact a fault has on your business, including the applications and users affected because it’s context aware
- Application performance SLAs, not component SLAs because it’s business outcome-driven
- Easier diagnosis of intermittent and ‘slow’ issues, meaning that your key pain points get addressed.
- How does Service Intelligence work?
Service Intelligence is based on open source software and BT’s Cloud Compute Infrastructure, along with Big Data and Machine Learning technologies. Our solution gives visibility of incidents through geographic mapping and topology views showing the relationship between components visually, allowing our teams to quickly determine root cause for rapid triage of the incident.
It will vastly reduce application downtime so our teams can quickly figure out the root cause and rapidly triage any incident. This really reduces application downtime which means less impact on your business. Because Service Intelligence drills down to the root cause, it removes any confusion associated with fault ownership and resolution.
And it can do this for you in seconds, rather than hours. Service Intelligence works by capturing the management data from your existing management tools, rather than interrogating the actual devices. That way, we can reduce your security risk, add new technology and suppliers quickly, and make sure you see the benefits quickly.
Service Intelligence will be able to offer:
- Better user/customer experience – faster incident resolution contributes to a better end-user experience which in turn encourages adoption of digital services
- Facilitate a more effective and productive digital business – the business gets meaningful metrics – an integrated set of business and operational metrics – for better decision making
- Liberation from the costs and constraints of managing technology – many organisations are fed up with running their own IT; they’d rather get back to their core business
