Intelligent Agents

Intelligent Agents to detect proactive issues and fixing in ITSM

Modern technology has brought into being an ever evolving and complex working environment. IT service organisations have been leading the world, bringing advancements in technology and show no signs of slowing down in the near future. To remain in tune with the modern business world, IT organizations have to go hand in hand with the ever-increasing speed of developing technology. 

Along with speed of production, quality of the product is also an inseparable part of growing success. Speed alone is not the measurement of success. It is for the IT management to ensure good product quality. As such, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) was created to help guide organizations in the successful development of IT products and services.

These libraries have made us aware that a problem in the product causes one or more incidents. Managing the lifecycle of these problems defines the problem management of the product. There is a certain way in which IT approaches problem management: reactively and proactively. 

Proactive Problem Management

Proactive problem management comes from a practice of continual improvement. It involves analysing the risk to services being offered, breaches to thresholds etc. proactive problem management are the activities targeted to improve overall availability and satisfaction of the end user with the IT Services. Proactive IT problem management includes trend analysis, risk assessment, affinity mapping with the help of intelligent agents. 

Let’s use an example to demonstrate the problem. When an application crashes, where a reactive problem management team would investigate the reason of crash by analysing crash or logs or fetching information from developer or vendor; whereas the proactive problem management team will start indicating the problem areas. Proactive ITSM prompts the system admin to take time and document the errors and research the potential causes.

Once detected, the system admins elevate this issue to network admins, database admins who can identify exact problems and shut down the affected interfaces, lowering or ending the errors. The admins analyse the situation and replace the affected components in order to eradicate the problem permanently. 

The biggest benefit of proactive issue fixing is that the number of critical incidents decrease by a great number. Detecting and solving issues with the proactive technique with intelligent agents in ITSM is a smart move seeing the innovation perspective. However, many people might not appreciate the same with regards to marketing perspective. It is difficult to convince people that you are solving a problem that never occured! 

However, let us understand how intelligent agents can detect and fix proactive issues. 

Understanding the intelligent agents

An autonomous entity that acts upon the environment with sensors and actuators for achieving goals is an intelligent agent. For achieving its goals, an intelligent agent learns from the environment. There are certain rules that AI agents follow: 

1. Ability to perceive the environment. 
2. Use the observations to conclude on decisions 
3. Drive decisions to actions 
4. AI agent must take a rational action

Types of Artificial Intelligence for ITSM

There are three types of artificial intelligence emerging within the service desk environment: 

1. Natural Language Processing

A computer program is capable of understanding the human language and responding in the machine way. This machine learning feature makes up for a majority of Natural Language Processing Intelligent Agents. 

1. Machine Learning

A machine learning Intelligent Agent is capable of extracting data from different reports, analyse and recognise patterns from a series of observations and make decisions based on the observations. 

1. Virtual Support Agents

The most widely used intelligent agent, the chatbot programs are used as a service desk agent. These virtual agents are a combination of AI and machine learning and are increasingly being used in ITSM. These agents have made conversations easy for service requests. 

Proactive issues fixing is the ability to find and fix problems that can cause harm to the business in the long run. 

Intelligent agents can detect proactive issues and fix with ITSM in the following ways: 

1. Event-based service resolution: to create incidents from create an incident from any event to analyse the flaws. 
2. Infrastructure based service resolution: to find root causes and provide more granularity based on CI information.
3. Impact model-based service resolution: to create impact models that can give greater visibility in an event of service disruption and for faster routing to resolve issues. 
4. Triage and remediation: channelise actions to find remedies as soon as the event occurs. 

The Scope of IA to detect proactive issues and fixing in ITSM

Discover: 

• A single pane of glass allows users to see assets and dependencies, on premises or in the public or private cloud. 
• Perform essential prevention and detection with security operations. 

Monitor: 

• Eliminate the need of manual incident creation. 
• Identify the root cause and optimize where the ticket is routed. 

Services: 

• Scale, support and reduce costs with the help of intelligent agent’s cognitive capabilities. 
• Fast and accurate service resolution for a higher user satisfaction. 

Remediate: 

• Analyse data from vulnerability scanners, identify security exposure and let corrective actions take place automatically to remediate security threats. 
• Real time visibility into patch deployments and improving exposed business services.