Whitepaper

Intelligent Digital
Operation Center
A Digital-First, Mobile-First Journey
Author:
Siddhartha Malwankar (CIS CFS Technology Office),
Sumit K. Jha (CIS CFS Technology Office)
Table of Content

1. Abstract 3

2. Market Trend 3

3. Key Challenges Faced by Operations Center (NOC or command center) 4

4. Intelligent Digital Operation Center (iDOC) 6

5. Features 8

7. Conclusion 13

8. About the Authors 14

Abstract
Traditionally, the Network Operations Center (NOC), eventually rechristened as the command center, is
a centralized location where network is curated for smooth functioning with minimal disruptions and
downtime. It is typically seen as a support function by the organization to avoid critical outages and
subsequent revenue loss. Running a successful NOC or command center requires as much efficiency as
possible. But it is no longer possible to manage, assure and operate services end-to-end over multiple
domains, technologies, and vendors, besides at the scale that the modern-day complex service systems
demand. The traditional NOC, and yesterday’s siloed tools and processes, cannot operate the dynamic
networks and services of the future. This is where ‘Intelligent Digital Operations System’ are required to
cater to the need of an advanced network monitoring and management system.

CXOs realize that improving and optimizing the operations is the key to driving new revenue and therefore
they are focussing on investing and upgrading infrastructure to support new age applications, Full Stack
Digital Operations (FSDO), and widely varying service requirements.

Complex infrastructure such as multi and hybrid cloud, Software Defined Network (SDN), containers, IoT,
etc. demands advance, agile, and business service-centric operational setup. It needs to unify IT operations
with cross-domain converged teams. Additionally, the hybrid working model has triggered the need to
rethink the overall operations strategy. Thus, the NOC or command center should therefore upgrade and
adapt to changing business priorities.

This white paper provides guidance on what the next generation operations center should look like for
the IT organization of the future that accomplishes the majority of operations like monitoring, performance
tracking, communication, ticket tracking, remediation, etc. It is evident that the next-generation operations
team has to be equipped with the right tools to make them more agile and proactive towards the ever-
changing business demands. Thus, let us venture into a digital-first, mobile-first journey through the
Intelligent Digital Operation Center (iDOC).

Market Trend

69% 47% 78%

Companies have increased Increased spending in Planning to Build a
scope in AI data analytics Infra automation and RPA Converged ITOM-ITSM Team
Key Challenges Faced by Operations Center
(NOC or command center)

Typically, NOC or command center is a centralized location where the operation staff provides 24x7x365
supervision, monitoring, and management of the network, servers, storage, databases, firewalls, devices,
and related external services.

The key functions include:

Incident and Communications Performance, quality,

problem L1 management and optimization
resolution (email, voice) reporting

Software/firmware
installation, Patch
troubleshooting, and management
updates

Modern-day complex infrastructure has created many challenges for operations center staff not only to
understand the technology and its outages but to maintain the right communication as well.

Some of the key challenges that operation centers face are listed below:

> Eye-on-glass monitoring with significant manual interventions.

> Lack of collaboration and communication across multiple teams.

> Dynamic changes in the infrastructure resulting in not up-to-date documentation.

> Troubleshooting and finding the root cause is more time-consuming as it includes data sources from
various tools.

> Disparate tools from different vendors or internal organizational groups and lack of integration. This
also requires additional staff to manage multiple tools.
> Tracking of business service impact.

> Over complicated or complex monitoring configurations which result in more noise and less
information.

> Hiccups in the network that are not always tracked as the monitoring configurations are not set as
per standards.

> Root cause analysis is more often done by L2 – L3 staff.

> Absence of integrated reporting and proactive capacity planning.

> Absence of end–to–end automation across the visibility, insights, and action phases that steers
self-heal.
Intelligent Digital Operation Center

Technology has evolved faster than ever. Therefore, it is imperative for operations center to adopt new-age
technologies and processes to cultivate digital operations and implement new ways of working. Organizations
want to take advantage of these to reduce cost, improve quality and transparency, as well as to provide
proactive IT services to the business.

iDOC is the modern way of monitoring, observability, and managing IT infrastructure, applications, and
new age technologies like Containers, IoT, Edge, etc. It provides the means to move away from the
traditional eye-on-glass approach to more mobile technology, eliminating the siloed legacy tools
architecture. It is the enabler for the transformation associated with the business strategy steering
converged business operations that unify IT operations with cross-domain teams which include
infrastructure, cloud applications, and security teams. It focuses on improving service delivery aligned
to the new-age hybrid delivery models. It leverages intelligent automation and artificial intelligence
to perform mundane repetitive tasks leaving the complex and/or critical ones for manual intervention,
thereby enabling the subject matter experts to focus on improving the process or service. It also enables
anywhere operations by providing the mobility that the experts need to support the service delivery from
anywhere and at any time.

iDOC is realized using an integrated AI-enabled toolset consisting of tools from one or more tools publishers
(or OEMs) that are integrated together to achieve the digital-first, mobile-first approach. Fundamentally,
these tools are categorized as tools layers and are tabulated below to provide a high-level mapping of the
tool’s functionality (which can be used as guidance for setting up an iDOC).
Intelligent Digital Operation Center (iDOC)

Features Tools Layers

AIOps-led Full-stack Operations Event Correlation Layer

Predictive Incident Detection Event Correlation Layer & Element Monitoring Layer

Reactive Incident Detection Element Monitoring Layer

Data-Driven Automation Automation/Orchestration Layer

Detecting Anomalies & Dynamic Baselining Element Monitoring Layer

Automatic Root Cause Identification Event Correlation Layer

Service impact view for business Event Correlation Layer

AI-Ops based event correlation and predictive insights Event Correlation Layer

There is no specific or standard tool set to define which monitoring, ticketing or automation tool can
be used for achieving these functionalities. But tools from large Tier 1 companies like ServiceNow, BMC,
Microfocus, AppDynamics, among others does cover the majority of these functionalities and thus enable
building an iDOC. Also, Joritz covers many functionalities at the Event Correlation Layer to support iDOC
and can be a viable proposition against Tier1 solutions.
Features

Key elements of iDOC are diagrammatically represented in the below figure. These elements are:

Visibility (Monitoring Systems) - This layer captures all the anomalies through
monitoring of various components related to digital experience, application and infra performance
and availability, logs, IoT, etc.

Insights (AIOps Event Management) - The anomalies detected at the Visibility

elements are processed, analyzed, and correlated to identify events that have or can potentially
impact the service availability. Also, historical data and performance is analyzed to predict
potential service performance issues, and thus identify the events proactively. All such events are
contextualized and enriched. This system also provides insight related to the potential cause.

Interaction (ITSM Systems) - The identified events which have or can have an impact
on service performance results in a corresponding incident in the ITSM tool. This further goes
through the problem and/or change management. The service map from CMDB provides the
service map that is used to identify the business impact preferably with associated financial
impact. The associated workflows including approvals based on associated ITSM personas are
automated. Also, the service targets associated with the incident are measured and tracked.

Action (Automation Systems) - The action to the identified potential cause is

triggered either through the self-heal capability within the monitoring or event management
tool that triggers the associated script or through an orchestrator that triggers the run book
automation (RBA). If the incident is due to reasons related to app or infra configuration, then the
associated configuration management tool is trigged to address the cause.

iDOC Core - This provides the digital and mobile channels to enable anywhere access. It
also represents the AI-ML capability of the toolset that constitutes the iDOC platform.
Features

Predictive & Performance Analytics

Probable Cause Analysis
Service Impact Visibility
Correlation & Contextualization
Integration & Suppression
Dynamic Threshold Setting
User Experience, Transaction And App
Code Level Visibility
INSIGHTS
App/DB/MW Availability And (AIOps Event Mgmt)
Performance
Infra Performance & Availability
App & Infra Logs

INTERACTION
(Monitoring Systems)
VISIBILITY

IoT
iDOC (ITSM Systems)
Digital - Mobility
AI - ML Incident, Problem and Change
Management
Business impact visibility
Change Risk Assessment
ACTION Knowledge Management
(Automation Systems) Service Target Measurement
Workflow automation

Auto-remediation Scripts
Run Book Automation
Infra & App Configuration Mgmt.
Features

The following section describes the various functionalities of iDOC in detail.

AIOps led Full-Stack operations monitoring and event correlation

AIOps led solution and tools, from various product companies, provide visibility and generate data
driven insights across entire infrastructure and application environment. Full Stack AIOps include
observability and pattern detection, which helps in the predictive investigation and making the
right recommendation using automation. Many organizations have already implemented some
level of automation, by using a COTS product or by scripting. Gartner quotes, “Infrastructure and
operations leaders need to adopt a more strategic stance to automation”. Hence it is now the
time to implement end-to-end automation across the environment with a focus on business
services and associated customer experience.

Reactive/proactive/predictive incident detection

Reactive, proactive, and predictive, are 3 different levels of monitoring. While reactive monitoring
is an old method, in recent world people have started to become more proactive, i.e., to identify
the incident before it occurs. While predictive incident management relates to anticipating the
incident that could occur with the help of various data insights. The reactive way of monitoring
is straightforward. When there is a failure an event is generated, and a ticket is created to work
upon. Proactive and predictive monitoring has few additional dependencies like, the monitoring
tool gathers data from multiple sources, and this requires high volume of data. The more data
points or sources are accessible, the tools provide more accurate results. And to understand the
data, AI/ML functionality is required to analyze and find the actual root cause. High configuration
servers are also required to host these NextGen tools, hence these are often hosted on the cloud
and delivered as a SaaS offering.

Data-driven automation

Data-driven automation is an important module within AIOps, including NLP, ML, and analytics
which can drive quality and reduce manual efforts. Data-driven automation provides remediation,
configuration, deployments, and DevOps functionalities. Data-driven automation along with AI,
supported by good quality data, can produce substantial time and cost savings and increase
efficiencies. Data-driven automation is always related to testing where tools like Selenium are
Features

used. But with the new NextGen monitoring tools, data-driven automation can be configured
as part of the operating activity. Usually, in ITSM processes like incident management, change
management, etc., many people are involved to make the decision. These decision steps can be
automated, to expedite the process which leads to faster resolution. Data-driven automation can
effectively address the complexity associated with the data and associated systems by efficiently
processing massive volumes of multi-formatted data across varied data sources, analyzing and
interpreting exceptions, learning patterns, and capturing insights that are hidden within the
data. Additionally, it reduced manual intervention as it is capable of making human-like and
judgment-driven actions. Data-driven automation is based on Robotic Process Automation and
Artificial Intelligence as the enabling technologies.

Detecting anomalies and using Dynamic Baselining feature in iDOC

A dictionary meaning of anomalies is ”something that is unusual enough to be noticeable or seem

strange”. The meaning applies to monitoring or the log data in IT world. “Detection of unusual
points or patterns that deviates from established baseline and reduce customer experience is
called an anomaly.” Policies can be created to manage the health of the system and to detect
abnormal behavior in the system by reducing:
• False Positive - Scenarios where an alarm is raised even though the system exhibits normal
behavior.
• False Negatives - Scenarios where the product failed to raise an alarm despite the occurrence
of an abnormal metric condition.
False positive alerts are the most common challenges while monitoring infra or apps. While these
alerts can be ignored, they consume significant efforts of IT staff. These can be eliminated in
many ways, out of which Dynamic Baselining is the most innovative feature of an iDOC solution.
With the AI/ML functionalities, the new age solution has capabilities to learn infra and apps
pattern, and avoid false positive, by comparing it with a recorded data in the past. It constantly
adjusts thresholds in an automated way and evaluates scripts to operate efficiently. Dynamic
Baselining is a technique used to compare real response times against historical averages. It is an
effective technique to provide meaningful insight into service anomalies without requiring the
impossible task of setting absolute thresholds for every transaction.
Features

Automatic root cause identification

Automatic root cause identification or analysis is a concept used to reduce MTTR for any incident.
AI/ML acts as the main engine to pinpoint the source of an incident, for quicker troubleshooting.
ML can help analyze the Topology graph, correlate with a list of events, and create a map of
dependencies to find out exactly why there has been service unavailability or a degradation in
the service performance. Automatic root cause analysis uses anomaly detection to decide if a
component or device can be the root cause of any failure. Hence to prevent outages automated
root cause and anomaly detection should be part of the same solution. Analysts agree that
monitoring solution with the feature of automated root cause analysis provides greater value to
IT users since they won’t be able to make sense analysis of the data is performed manually from
multiple sources. IT Ops teams need software to help them throughout their deductive problem-
solving process — accelerating resolution by streamlining investigation and collaborating across
teams, quickly identifying the root cause, and automating remediation. Instead of spending their
time treating recurring symptoms, they should attack problems at their core.

Service impact view for business

Service impact view is a way to visualize the impact created by any incident on the Concept
Inventory (CI). This is shown in the form of an impact tree. This feature provides a top-down view
enabled by the service map. It is also for root cause analysis. This feature is available in most of
the new-age monitoring tools when the models and CIs relationship are built and maintained
automatically either through the integration of the event management tool with CMDB or
directly created within the event management tool itself. The service impact view makes the IT
process more reliable by providing:
• The user’s visibility into service and the degree of impact an incident has on the service.
• Efficiency through automated mapping of services that improve productivity of users by
reducing the time and effort taken to handle the errors.
• Accuracy of the information associated with the service map as whenever there is a change
to the service or its constituting components, the service map is updated in real-time.

CMDB is the primary source of CI inventory in any organization. However, to understand the root
cause and service impact, additional modules are required to be configured or bought.
Conclusion
The emerging, next-generation technologies will continue to transform IT services and drive digital
transformation, and so will the approach to monitor the end user expereince and service performance. The
future of service operations and delivery relies on a journey towards automation, third party integrations,
and flexibility to accommodate new business models, capabilities, and technologies. As organizations are
moving towards a unified IT operations function powered by converged operations across the service
domains, Intelligent Digital Operations Center is a solution to provide future ready operations center
leveraging new technologies and limiting manual operations. It augments the workforce with AI and
enables data-driven and predictive operations that steers self-heal and automation.

iDOC acts as an enabler for our FSDO operating model. It covers the tooling layer where features like the
below are covered:

• End-to-end integrated operations

• Open pluggable platform
• Agility and scalability
• Intelligent monitoring and problem resolution
• Secured operations

Intelligent Digital Operations Center provides the operations team and stakeholders with power on finger-
tips and anywhere operations that is provided using tools that have a mobile application, thus enabling
the digital-first, mobile-first journey.
 About the Authors

Siddhartha Malwankar
Associate Principal – Cross-Functional Services, Cloud & Infrastructure Services

Siddhartha Malwankar works as an Associate Principal for the cross-functional services

technology office team within LTIMindtree's Cloud and Infrastructure Services (CIS)
division. With more than 18 years of IT experience spanning across IT service management
tools, consulting, pre-sales, and implementation. He is currently responsible for helping
LTIMindtree customers to address their service management challenges by evaluating
how tools are designed and deployed in service-managed service assurance areas.
He also regularly contributes to thought leadership, related to service offering, and
practice development areas.

Sumit K. Jha
Principal Architect – Cross Functional Services, CIS LTIMindtree

Sumit K. Jha leads the cross functional service technology office and transformation
execution team within LTIMindtree's Cloud and Infrastructure Services (CIS). He is an
author, a thought leader and an expert in IT strategy, SIAM, ITSM, customer experience
and transformation. He has spearheaded the creation of NextGen service management
offerings and go-to-market strategy for LTIMindtree. He is a member representing India
at ISO in the work group for service management and is also an honorary member of
the board of studies (Faculty of Computer Studies) for one of the India’s leading
private universities. He has authored ‘Making SIAM work: Adopting Service Integration
and Management for Your Business’ (first Book on SIAM) and ‘Tackling Roadblocks
During IT Implementation’. He has been a speaker at various conferences on service
management.

LTIMindtree is a global technology consulting and digital solutions company that enables enterprises across industries to reimagine business
models, accelerate innovation, and maximize growth by harnessing digital technologies. As a digital transformation partner to more than 700+
clients, LTIMindtree brings extensive domain and technology expertise to help drive superior competitive differentiation, customer experiences, and
business outcomes in a converging world. Powered by nearly 90,000 talented and entrepreneurial professionals across more than 30 countries,
LTIMindtree — a Larsen & Toubro Group company — combines the industry-acclaimed strengths of erstwhile Larsen and Toubro Infotech and
Mindtree in solving the most complex business challenges and delivering transformation at scale. For more information, please
visit www.ltimindtree.com.

LTIMindtree Limited is a subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro Limited