The document discusses blended analytics as the key to realizing the full promise of IT Operations Analytics (ITOA). Blended analytics analyzes data from multiple sources like APM, logs, networks together, focusing on changes, to provide useful insights. Today's ITOA solutions are limited by operating in silos focused only on symptoms. Blended analytics correlates data across silos, identifies root causes and patterns, and analyzes the impact of changes to help detect and troubleshoot issues earlier. Powerful analytics like machine learning and heuristics are needed to make sense of large, diverse IT data sources and deliver meaningful insights for optimal IT operations.

1. Originally Published in Inside Big Data June 11, 2015
http://insidebigdata.com/2015/06/11/blended-analytics-the-secret-sauce-of-itoa/
Blended Analytics: The Secret Sauce of ITOA
June 11, 2015 by Daniel Gutierrez
In this special guest feature, Sasha Gilenson of Evolven examines the
importance of blended analytics in realizing the promise of IT Operations
Analytics. Sasha Gilenson is CEO of Evolven, a technology company that
provides IT Operations Analytics solutions for enterprise businesses.
Founded in 2007, Evolven is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey,
USA, with offices in Europe and Israel. Prior to Evolven, Sasha spent 13
years with Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP), managing the QA
organization and participating in establishing Mercury Interactive’s
Software as a Service (SaaS). Sasha played a key role in the development of Mercury Interactive’s
worldwide Business Technology Optimization (BTO) strategy and drove field operations of the Wireless
Business Unit, all while taking on the duties as the Mercury Interactive’s top “guru” in quality processes
and IT practices domain.
One of the most talked about topics in IT has been IT Operations Analytics (ITOA). Leading vendors and
start-ups have made significant progress in leveraging analytics to offer better IT operational insights.
However, available ITOA solutions still struggle to make sense of IT Big Data, which perpetuates
operations in narrow silos.
IT decision makers need to finally break these silos, by applying an approach that blends and analyzes all
relevant sources of IT information. Extracting insights and drawing intelligent correlations from a variety of
data, Blended Analytics helps to see beyond individual components and finally draw insights based on
the whole picture.
What’s Wrong with Today’s ITOA Solutions
Today’s ITOA solutions are limited by silos, a focus on symptoms, and weak analytics.
 Silos: Who sees the whole picture? IT operations data is very diverse, nevertheless, many ITOA
solutions perpetuate a siloed approach, making existing silo tools (e.g. Application Performance
Management or APM) “smarter”, while leaving them limited to only their own silo.
 Symptom-focused: ITOA solutions focus on the “symptoms” (APM, log, network) indicating
problems, only responding after something happens (an abnormality arises). Yet when a “symptom”
is observed, users may already be feeling the impact from the abnormal system behavior. Even
more so, identifying the true root-cause of problems based only on “symptoms” is difficult.

2. Originally Published in Inside Big Data June 11, 2015
http://insidebigdata.com/2015/06/11/blended-analytics-the-secret-sauce-of-itoa/
 Narrow Analytics: Many of the new ITOA components intended to enhance current product suites
are merely new dashboards or a KPI aggregation, still relying on users to define data analysis
algorithms, or just providing catalogs of pre-defined statistic functions.
Blended Analytics: The Secret Sauce
To fully realize the value of ITOA, analytics must provide actionable insights to drive operational decisions
and activities (both manual and automated). In contrast to the limitations of today’s ITOA solutions,
the Blended Analytics approach provides useful insights by analyzing all relevant data sources, focusing
on change, and applying powerful analytics.
All relevant Data Sources: Blended Analytics collects, correlates and analyzes data together from multiple
data sources (APM, Network, Log, Deployment Automation, Service Desk, CMDB, and Changes (e.g. in
configuration, data, capacity, code, etc.). The analysis uses a combination of methods to extract useful
insights, and identify behavioral patterns, unusual event occurrences and anomalies.
By combining information from across silos, correlating symptoms and root causes as well as mapping
them into context that users can grasp, Blended Analytics improves the probability of early issue
detection (prevention), accelerating troubleshooting.
Change-centric: a critical component, yet surprisingly often overlooked data source is changes. In today’s
complex IT environments, most operational issues are due to changes. This is why the first question
usually asked when performance issues come up is: “what changed?” It is extremely difficult to know
exactly what changed. What piece of code, what configuration parameter, what data table was changed
as a result of some automated or manual action, which could be authorized or not.
Effective Blended Analytics analyze the data stream through a prism of change, offering quick access to
actual and potential root causes.
Powerful Analytics: In order to turn the massive amount of heterogeneous data into actionable insights,
Blended Analytics relies on a combination of analysis approaches, including Machine Learning based
anomaly detection, risk scoring, domain-specific heuristics and knowledge-base.
Delivering the Full Promise of ITOA
In today’s competitive, complex landscape, optimized IT operations serve as the foundation for business
success. To ultimately realize the benefits and promise of IT Operations Analytics, IT decision makers
need to apply Blended Analytics to bust out of their silo-focused approach, and put CHANGE as the
cornerstone for analyzing everything that happens in IT environments. By collecting all relevant data
sources, focusing on change and applying powerful analytics, the next generation of IT Operations
Analytics tools will truly offer intelligent analytics and critical insights for maintaining stability and
performance.