ASL Optimizes Application Performance with IBM AIOps Solution

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Organizations are now accelerating their digital transformation, therefore transforming the application landscape and making it more hybrid and complex. However, Hong Kong has seen a shortage of tech talent in recent years, presenting several key challenges to organizations when managing their applications.

The talent shortage is an urgent concern that is currently slowing progress toward digital transformation goals. A stretched IT team, coupled with legacy or manual incident response solutions, can lead to delays in issue identification and responses as well as difficulties in tracking down information to identify bugs. With IT staffing shortages, incident management costs increased by hiring expensive vendors or time-intensive workflow.

Automated application observability

Intelligent automation can offset issues. There’s an increasing number of organizations looking to take advantage by applying artificial intelligence to IT operations (known as AIOps) by leveraging AI-driven intelligence and automation, aiming to make quick and accurate decisions and maintain resiliency in this digital era. A leading global IT solutions and services provider, Automated Systems (H.K.) Limited (ASL) decided to partner with IBM for addressing this customer need. With more than 49 years of successful business, ASL is based in Hong Kong and Macau and covers mainland China, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Europe and the United States, serving over 3,000 customers from corporations of all sizes and government bureaus, departments and related organizations worldwide.

ASL established Unified Operation Center in 2020, an intelligent managed service platform that integrates the world’s leading technologies in application development (Dev), cybersecurity (Sec), omni-channel managed services (Ops) to provide monitoring and preventive monitoring services. With the ability to empower application performance management (APM), high transparency, user-friendly and simple interface, and traffic observability, ASL chose IBM Instana Observability to help empower their customers to take on the first step towards their journey to AIOps.

Kenny Mak, Vice President, Solution Division at Automated Systems (H.K.) Limited found Instana Observability is a unique and robust application performance monitoring solution in the market, that optimizes customer experience monitoring with detailed performance data, and allows customers to view and visualize data analysis. In addition, the pricing of IBM Instana Observability is simple, billed per host, per month, and yearly, delivering the best value in the industry for half of the average cost.

Boost functionality and observability in application performance monitoring

While most of the tools in the market allow organizations to monitor the hardware and network’s traffic and data, IBM Instana Observability, part of IBM AIOps solutions, covers a much wider picture of applications, such as the database size, the number of logs and API traffics. What’s more, it offers both SaaS and on-premises solutions depending on the customer’s unique needs.

Kenny added that IBM Instana Observability features a simple interface and UI which is easy to install and offers a comprehensive way to monitor and manage server-side and client-side applications and performance metrics, allowing ASL to easily track and manage all applications with high transparency and in a timely manner. This came in handy for ASL, which also supports mobile application development to easily oversee traffic as well as issues among the extensive bespoke range of apps.

A widely quoted study by the Aberdeen Group found that, a one-second application latency may lead to a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and a 7% loss in conversions. IBM Instana Observability provides continuous automatic discovery of both technology stacks and services, so the monitoring is always aligned with the application under management. It also automatically detects performance issues and provides automatic root cause analysis, helping ASL to effectively identify and resolve incidents faster.

IBM Instana Observability helps ASL to work closely with their customers to facilitate active and effective communications and operations support, as shared by Kenny. For instance, Unified Operation Center services are being favorably adopted by their customers and are comprehensively supporting their needs.

Holistic Roadmap to AIOps

Applications maintenance and monitoring are only the first phase of the AIOps journey. There is a current trend among organizations, especially in the application industry, of taking preventive measures by managing and monitoring resources effectively. To address this demand, IBM offers a number of IT solutions that help organizations optimize their IT processes through leveraging AIOps.

Application resource management (ARM) is the second phase of this AIOps journey. IBM Turbonomic ARM offers a top-down, application-driven approach to organizations that can continuously analyse an applications’ resource needs and generate fully automatable actions to ensure applications always get what they need to perform– continuously, in real-time and without human intervention.

Customers can now automate critical actions that proactively deliver the most efficient use of computing, storage and network resources to their apps reliably and consistently. Together, IBM Instana Observability and IBM Turbonomic ARM turn observability into action, delivering automation that prevents application performance risks while maximizing elasticity.

In the third phase of this AIOps journey, users can integrate IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, IBM Instana Observability and IBM Turbonomic ARM to ensure their organizations have the right capabilities needed to move from reactive to proactive IT operations management, effectively monitoring data in real-time and providing predictive insights to automatically remediate incidents.

Although AIOps is still a relatively new approach when compared to existing technologies, it is warmly welcomed across various industry sectors. The success of the ASL Unified Operation Center reinstates our commitment to our clients to meet their organization’s IT needs. We will continue to support partners and organizations in Hong Kong to embark on a journey to AIOps, ultimately accelerating digital transformation.