Shift left is not new. In DevOps, for example, shift left means involving testing teams earlier in the development process and testing at all stages to find bugs when they are easier and less costly to fix. In NetOps, it means enabling more staff to take on first-level troubleshooting responsibilities without having to escalate to the experts.
Shift left for NetOps teams using the Riverbed IQ offers significant benefits:
- Reduces alert fatigue by identifying only business-impacting events
- Enhances IT satisfaction by enabling junior staff while taking the burden off the IT experts
- Improves digital experience by reducing mean time to know/resolution (MTTK/MTTR)
- Improves IT efficiency by solving problems sooner
- Increases productivity by enabling IT experts to focus on revenue-generating projects
Let’s explore each of these benefits in more detail…
Reduce alert fatigue
Today’s IT environments are profoundly more complex than in the past, with immensely more data and alerts to contend with. Most monitoring alerts provide little context to guide the troubleshooting process. For some companies, it’s has become impossible to manually investigate every alert; others turn alerting off altogether and wait for the phone to ring. In short, it’s becoming more difficult for IT to separate critical events from the noise, to identify business-impacting events, or to resolve incidents quickly.
Riverbed IQ can separate the noise from impactful events and get more IT staff troubleshooting at all levels, not just the experts. By leveraging AI/ML-based correlations to identify business impacting issues, and low-code investigations (runbooks) to automate the process of gathering evidence, building context, and setting priorities, the Riverbed IQ service provides the right details to enable incidents to be resolved by first-level responders.
Enhance IT satisfaction
Enterprises often rely on a small number of highly skilled IT to troubleshoot complex issues. These skilled team members typically have wide technical and institutional knowledge, which puts them in high demand. Frequently, when the experts aren’t available, it takes an organization longer to get to resolution, or the problem may not get resolved until the expert returns. And, for IT team members who get pulled into troubleshooting when it’s not their primary job, it means they are being removed from strategic projects. This may lead to project delays and cost overruns.
Riverbed IQ codifies the knowledge that resides in your experts into automated runbooks that can easily be tweaked to your organization’s requirements. These customizable troubleshooting workflows enable more IT staff to troubleshoot effectively. By spreading the burden across more people, precious expert resources won’t get burnt out and we empower the junior staff to learn faster and take on more responsibility.
Improve digital experience
Companies that enable level 1-2 IT staff to proactively identify and resolve problems early in the troubleshooting process achieve more first-time resolutions. Earlier resolution leads to less downtime, better service quality and increased user satisfaction.
Improve efficiency
By avoiding the need to escalate incidents to IT experts, the organization improves MTTR. Shift left also enables IT experts to focus on revenue-generating projects. By freeing up time previously dedicated to incident or fault resolutions, IT experts can focus on forward-looking initiatives that advance the organizations digital transformation.
Enable shift left with Riverbed IQ
Riverbed IQ is a cloud-native, SaaS-delivered, open, and programmable solution for Unified Observability that empowers all IT staff to identify and fix problems efficiently. It uses full-fidelity end user experience and network performance data and then applies AI and machine learning (ML) to correlate disparate data streams and identify business-impacting events. This intelligence also informs low-code investigative runbooks that replicate the troubleshooting workflows of IT experts to gather additional context, filter out noise, and set priorities. The result reduces the volume of alerts to the most business impacting, and empowers staff at all skill levels to identify and solve problems faster.
To learn more about how Riverbed IQ helps organizations shift left, visit https://www.riverbed.com/products/riverbed-iq.