Executive Summary

AIOps

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and IT leaders face the dual challenge of optimizing IT operations while simultaneously driving innovation in an increasingly complex marketplace. The intricacies involved in managing a diverse array of technology environments require enterprises to harness a multitude of tools and platforms to address unique operational demands spanning various departments and functionalities. Technological advancements often outpace traditional strategies, so it is essential for IT leaders to have a comprehensive understanding of the software solutions at their disposal.

IT Management software plays a pivotal role in aligning technology initiatives with business objectives. As enterprises strive to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and maintain a competitive edge, these approaches become critical enablers of streamlined operations and effective resource allocation. Furthermore, as enterprises transition to more agile and cloud-centric architectures, the integration of comprehensive IT Management software platforms facilitates enhanced visibility, control and adaptability across the entire IT stack. This is particularly important as CIOs look to future-proof enterprise architecture and ensure that technology strategies are not only reactive but also proactive in addressing emerging challenges and opportunities.

ISG defines AIOps, or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, as the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies into IT processes. It represents a significant shift from traditional operational management methods towards a strategy for optimizing and managing IT operations. AIOps not only streamlines complex workflows but also enhances overall operational efficiency, addressing the intricate challenges faced by modern IT environments.

At its core, AIOps encompasses a suite of tools and applications designed to automate critical IT processes, thereby improving incident response times and minimizing downtime. By leveraging advanced algorithms and analytics, AIOps approaches can gather and analyze vast amounts of data sourced from various operational domains, including application performance monitoring, infrastructure metrics, event logs and user experiences. This breadth of data allows organizations to detect anomalies, correlate events and identify root causes in real time, vastly reducing the manual effort typically associated with problem-solving.

One of the most impressive capabilities of AIOps is its proactive nature. Rather than merely responding to incidents after they occur, AIOps empowers IT teams to predict potential issues before they escalate. This foresight is made possible through the continuous analysis of data patterns and trends, allowing enterprises to adopt a more anticipatory approach to IT Management. By identifying irregularities early, IT operations can avert crises, ensuring a smoother user experience and more reliable service delivery.

Another critical advantage of AIOps is its facilitation of intelligent automation. Routine tasks that traditionally consumed valuable IT resources can now be automated, enabling teams to focus on higher-value strategic initiatives. Tasks such as software updates, system monitoring and even some incident resolutions can be accomplished through automated processes, significantly enhancing operational efficiency. Additionally, AIOps can implement self-healing mechanisms, allowing systems to automatically correct minor issues without human intervention. This not only minimizes downtime but also reduces the strain on IT personnel who often find themselves inundated with routine tasks.

The transformation brought about by AIOps extends beyond automation: it also paves the way for intelligent decision-making. Through 2026, demand for real-time insights into the health and performance of IT systems will result in 40% of enterprises funding AIOps strategies to streamline operations and optimize resources. With real-time insights and data aggregation across all IT functions, enterprises can make informed decisions that impact overall business operations. AIOps helps bridge the gap between IT and business objectives by ensuring that IT services align with the strategic aims of the enterprise.

Enterprise AIOps software represents a revolutionary approach to optimizing IT operations. By embracing AI and ML technologies, organizations can enhance operational efficiency, reduce manual intervention and deliver consistent, high-quality services. For CIOs and IT leaders, the strategic adoption of AIOps is crucial for fostering innovation and agility, ultimately driving sustainable growth.

Enterprises depend on data-driven insights to enhance operational efficiency and require an effective AIOps strategy. Enterprises should take this opportunity to reassess their AIOps software approach and partners to better address business needs. Here are four IT requirements to consider while building the business case for AIOps software:

• Increasing complexity of IT environments: Modern IT environments are becoming increasingly complex, encompassing cloud services, on-premises infrastructure and hybrid systems. AIOps software approaches must provide comprehensive visibility and correlation across these environments. By evaluating current AIOps capabilities, enterprises can identify gaps that may be hindering their ability to monitor and optimize performance effectively.
• Proactive incident management: Amid a growing reliance on technology is the need for proactive incident management. AIOps software can automate incident detection and response, reducing downtime and improving service reliability. When enterprises evaluate their AIOps partners, it is important to verify they offer advanced features such as predictive analytics and intelligent automation that facilitate swift remediation of potential issues.
• Resource optimization and cost efficiency: As economic pressures mount, enterprises are compelled to optimize resource utilization across IT operations. A review of AIOps strategies reveals opportunities for consolidating data sources, reducing duplication of effort and enhancing overall efficiency. Enterprises should seek AIOps software approaches that not only streamline operations but also provide insights into cost-saving measures and resource allocation.
• Enhance business agility: Enterprises need to adapt quickly to market changes and customer demands. AIOps software that enables rapid insight generation and facilitates automation can enhance business agility. By re-evaluating AIOps partnerships, enterprises can uncover tools that empower teams to respond rapidly to evolving situations, driving innovation and competitive advantage.

By focusing on key strategic elements such as complexity management, proactive incident resolution, resource optimization and business agility, IT leaders can make a strong case for the necessary investments and changes. A refined AIOps strategy will position enterprises to achieve higher operational efficiency and respond effectively to digital business challenges.

Generative AI (GenAI) plays a pivotal role in enhancing IT Management software by automating complex processes, improving decision-making and driving efficiencies across various IT functions. By leveraging GenAI, enterprises can streamline service delivery, optimize resource allocation and proactively identify and resolve issues, ultimately leading to improved operational performance. Additionally, GenAI enables IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, facilitating more informed strategic planning and enhancing collaboration among teams. As enterprises embrace digital transformation, IT Management software integrated with GenAI capabilities becomes essential for staying competitive.

In the field of AIOps, GenAI offers enterprise IT teams innovative capabilities to enhance operational efficiency and improve decision-making. One primary application of GenAI within AIOps is its ability to analyze significant amounts of operational data and generate insights in real time. This functionality enables teams to quickly identify patterns, anomalies and weaknesses in system performance, which can significantly reduce the time spent on monitoring and diagnostics.

GenAI can also streamline incident response workflows by automating the creation of alerts and notifications based on learned behavior from historical incidents. By understanding the contexts in which issues arise, GenAI can prioritize alerts and differentiate between critical incidents and minor alerts, allowing technicians to focus on high-impact issues first.

Furthermore, GenAI facilitates intelligent automation within AIOps by generating scripts that automate routine operational tasks, such as resource scaling and routine system checks. By implementing automated approaches, IT teams can achieve greater consistency and accuracy and free up valuable time to focus on strategic initiatives.

Additionally, predictive analytics supported by GenAI allows enterprises to anticipate potential issues before they become critical. By leveraging historical data and identifying trends, enterprises can take proactive measures, minimizing disruptions and maintaining optimal system performance.

Agentic AI, though not yet available, could play a crucial role in future AIOps by automating and enhancing IT operations. One potential application is to manage and resolve incidents autonomously by analyzing historical data to initiate corrective actions like scaling resources, enabling quicker incident responses. Additionally, it could facilitate intelligent anomaly detection by continuously analyzing data to identify irregularities, automatically escalating issues to relevant teams. Furthermore, agentic AI could recommend performance optimizations based on resource utilization patterns. Ultimately, its integration within AIOps could empower enterprises to manage incidents and maintain performance more efficiently and proactively.

CIOs and IT leaders should approach IT Management software incorporating GenAI, large language models (LLMs) and future agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. While these technologies offer significant benefits, they also come with unique challenges and prerequisites. A holistic evaluation must include technical aspects as well as business, ethical and strategic considerations. Other areas of focus include risk awareness, critical infrastructure, organizational readiness, governance and compliance, and a long-term perspective on sustainability and scalability of AI approaches.

ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. It is critical to select the right software provider and product to improve the performance of your enterprise’s people, process, information and technology components.

The ISG Buyers Guide for AIOps software is designed to provide a 360-degree view of a software provider’s ability to optimize the delivery, performance and governance of IT services within an enterprise. Separate Buyers Guide research reports are available for ITSM, IT Operations Management, FinOps and Observability software.

The ISG Buyers Guide for AIOps evaluates products based on capabilities including collaboration and communications, data visualization, event correlation, GenAI and ML, integration with other systems and tools, intelligent automation, performance monitoring, predictive analytics, root cause analysis, security and compliance, and self-healing features. To be included in this Buyers Guide, software providers must meet or exceed the inclusion criteria and have commercially available AIOps software products.

The insights gained from understanding current IT Management software are invaluable for IT leaders who aim to align their technology investments with organizational goals, optimize workflows and foster a culture of innovation. By investing in the right tools, CIOs can unlock new avenues for growth and transformation, paving the way for enterprises to thrive.

This Buyers Guide report evaluates the following software providers that offer products addressing key elements for AIOps: Aisera, BMC Software, Datadog, Dell Technologies, Digitate, Dynatrace, Elastic, IBM, LogicMonitor, New Relic, OpenText, OpsRamp, PagerDuty, ScienceLogic, SolarWinds, SoundHound AI, Splunk, Vitria and Zenoss.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for AIOps is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for AIOps software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for AIOps to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of AIOps technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of AIOps software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating AIOps systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
   Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Dynatrace atop the list, followed by SoundHound AI and Splunk. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Splunk has done so in five categories; Datadog and BMC in four; Dynatrace in three; New Relic and PagerDuty in two; and SoundHound AI and IBM in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: BMC, Datadog, Dynatrace, IBM, PagerDuty, SoundHound AI and Splunk.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: LogicMonitor, New Relic and SolarWinds.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Elastic, Dell Technologies and OpenText.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Aisera, Digitate, OpsRamp, ScienceLogic, Vitria and Zenoss.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle AIOps, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (15%), Capability (30%), Reliability (10%), Adaptability (15%) and Manageability (10%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Dynatrace, Datadog and Splunk were designated Product Experience Leaders. While not a Leader, SoundHound AI was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise product experience requirements.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are BMC, Splunk and PagerDuty. These category Leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for AIOps in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $40 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 100 full-time employees. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 18 months.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant AIOps products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. Providers that offer multiple, separate tools or AI functionality without specific application to ITOps were excluded These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”