AI-powered management of 20,000+ monthly events.
Clear visualization explains patterns and CI interdependencies.
Faster issue resolution with effective root cause analysis.
Identify root cause and fix issues fast when 20,000+ monthly events create a lot of noise and duplication.
NOS is the biggest communications and entertainment group in Portugal. It offers latest generation fixed and mobile phone, television, Internet, voice, and data solutions for all market segments. It is a leader in cinema film distribution and exhibition with the greatest number of cinema complexes and cinema theatres in Portugal. NOS has 5 million mobile phone, 1.7 million television, 1.8 million fixed telephone, and 1.5 million fixed broad band Internet customers.
As a large organization providing 24/7 support to its customers, NOS manages over 20,000 IT events and alarms monthly. Not all of these require an instant response, and many are actually duplicate alarms of the same event. It is therefore important to distinguish noise from fact by analyzing patterns in the event stream and using these patterns to group events together, which, with a high probability, originate from the same problem. Paulo Vale, IT Manager for Service Management at NOS knew who to turn to for help with this: “We already use Micro Focus Operations Bridge to monitor the internal and external end-user experience of our applications so that we can use this feedback to optimize for instance our mobile app experience. We also leverage Operations Bridge for event monitoring and were pleased to see the recent AIOps capabilities within the platform offering automatic event correlation (AEC) using machine-learning algorithms.”
The full-stack AIOps platform, powered by Operations Bridge, automates log, event, and metric analyses. A group of related events is transformed into a single (correlated) event sent back to Operations Bridge Manager (OBM). This grouping enables focused event processing for an operator. It shows all related events grouped together by AEC, making it easier to identify and work on the root cause. Closing the group event automatically closes all associated events.
The new capabilities were implemented quickly, according to Vale: “Introducing Operations Bridge AEC within our 24/7 ecosystem without incurring any downtime was really quite easy. Rules configuration is entirely automated so after installation no manual configuration was required. We immediately saw the benefits, in particular around time savings in identifying root cause issues. In the past, we had to create configuration item (CI) collections manually in the Run-time Service Model (RTSM).”
Paulo Vale – IT MANAGER FOR SERVICE MANAGEMENT
NOS
When a solution is enhanced by AI-based capabilities it can be compared with a black box, where the team can see the results, but not necessarily understand how and why they were produced. For this reason, Micro Focus introduced the AEC Explained UI to Operations Bridge. This provides insight into how patterns are learnt, how events are grouped, and how results are interpreted. This was a useful feature for NOS as they used AEC more. “Take for example one CI that could have more than 1,000 relationships in terms of functional and infrastructure dependencies,” says Vale. “It’s very difficult to build a comprehensive picture of these relationships. Leveraging the AEC Explained UI we can easily see, and drill down into, the topology partitions the CI belongs to so that we can understand the detail related to it and get to the root cause of any issue much faster. Our team really likes this functionality.”
To further enhance automated data analysis, Micro Focus launched the OPTIC Data Lake as part of its AIOps platform. This is based on Vertica technology. It provides data storage and can receive and process high-volume and high-velocity data from a variety of independent data sources—key for comprehensive root cause analysis. The OPTIC Data Lake therefore acts as a common data ingestion platform and every release supports more data types that can be streamed into OPTIC, bringing services on top of the collected data, and introducing performance improvements to the AEC analytic capabilities.
Vale concludes: “We are really impressed by the investment Micro Focus makes in the AIOps platform, powered by Operations Bridge.”
Paulo Vale – IT MANAGER FOR SERVICE MANAGEMENT
NOS
