January 13, 2023

Overview

Optimiz

Optimiz is a valued partner to large IT services companies, using AI and expertise of skilled practitioners to help small-to-midsized enterprises ensure top performance and uptime for critical business services. Optimiz helps enterprises adapt and thrive in the digital era by simplifying the process of monitoring digital products and services. The company’s AI-powered services help customers extract more useful value from monitoring tools for meeting SLAs.

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“Optimiz is tool-agnostic, so we needed an intelligent observability solution that could make sense of any amount of data from any source. Moogsoft fits that bill – plus it is easy to deploy, flexible, and scales for our midsized and large MSP customers.”

— Tom McIlwham, Chief Strategy Officer, Optimiz

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As a leader in providing services and solutions across the AIOps spectrum, Optimiz delivers application performance monitoring (APM), information technology service management (ITSM), and infrastructure monitoring. Services include event correlation and ITSM process workflow automation. The business purpose of Optimiz’ services is to partner with customers on the task of reducing the number of incidents and mean time to resolve (MTTR) them, while delivering the best digital experience for clients’ customers. Optimiz is based in Toronto, Ontario in Canada. For more information, visit optimiz.ca.

Business Challenges

Get More Value from Customers’ Monitoring Tools

A managed service provider engagement often entails the use of IT operations monitoring data generated by a customer’s existing tools. These may include any combination of application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and service monitoring. One approach is to simply take over monitoring with the same tools used by the customer. Typically, the customer is already overwhelmed by the velocity and volume of data and alerts – that’s why they are hiring the MSP. As a boutique MSP, Optimiz did not want to inherit the same problem for multiple customers so it looked for ways to solve this issue with AI. “We’ve spent a lot of our energy getting our heads around AI,” says Tom McIlwham, chief strategy officer at Optimiz. “We wanted a solution that takes any data from any tool used by a customer, automatically correlates it, and adds intelligence you don’t get with standalone tools.” While leaning toward an AIOps approach, the discovery process also revealed a subtle issue: monitoring tools may claim to do AIOps, but it’s only on data in their own domain. “We needed to be tool-agnostic to service an array of customers and different tools,” says Osama Awwad, chief technology officer at Optiiz.

Leverage Practitioners Across MSP Client Base

Another business challenge was to create efficiency for its relatively small team of skilled practitioners. Their expertise was what makes Optimiz unique. “One reason for our success is several of us come from the customer’s side of the desk,” says McIlwham. “We’ve worked as service managers for large companies delivering outsourced services. We know what clients are looking for as we’ve lived their pain.” He says the choice of AIOps was to leverage the team’s collective expertise with algorithms and automation across the extended customer base. Using AI was the only practical approach for producing the desired quality level of customer service – and meeting the Optimiz business plan.

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“There are three ways AI can dramatically improve services monitoring for MSPs: Reduce time to identify issues, improve app availability, and reduce the risk of damage to customer brand. Moogsoft’s cloud platform uses data from customers’ monitoring tools to do this for us automatically.”

—Tom McIlwham, Chief Strategy Officer, Optimiz

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Solution

Deploying Moogsoft to Manage Customers’ Digital Performance

Optimiz chose Moogsoft based on the solution’s capabilities. “To effectively monitor digital performance, we needed to look at a customer’s whole ecosystem of the application – security, network, database, storage, compute, microservices, and so forth,” says McIlwham. For enabling observability, Moogsoft provides an API for easy custom integration of data from any source, including several pre-built integrations. As an extensible cloud platform, Optimiz was able to quickly deploy the solution and integrate its existing portfolio of customers’ monitoring and reporting tools. For example, by integrating AppDynamics, Grafana, and other tools, Optimiz practitioners use Moogsoft “on top” as a single pane of glass tool for full observability expected by a site reliability engineer (SRE), DevOps, or IT Ops professional. Integrations for each customer’s unique tools enable Optimiz practitioners to monitor performance across the entire customer base.

Integration was the precursor for ingesting all customer data into the Moogsoft cloud platform. It enables the automated application of patented algorithms and workflow to deduplicate and correlate alerts, eliminate noise, detect anomalies, and identify probable root cause of issues affecting service performance.

Optimiz found that Moogsoft can be customer-provisioned in minutes to operate across cloud workloads, microservices, and Kubernetes-based infrastructure and a vast array of standard tools. Optimiz practitioners now use Moogsoft to turn customer data about events, metrics and logs into at-a-glance dashboards. Whether used by ops professionals or c-level business executives, stakeholders can instantly see how the company’s essential resources are actively building and improving the customer’s digital experience.

As a sidenote: Team familiarity with Moogsoft also had something to do with the choice of this modern approach of using AI for performance monitoring. One practitioner’s prior employment was with a significant player in event management. “Going proof of concept against Moogsoft, we always lost the deal,” he says. Experience like that was conducive to discarding the alternatives!

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“Visualization with Moogsoft on top of other monitoring tools is helping us position our MSP solution to prospective customers. They can easily see the value of how a complete AIOps solution works to support their performance requirements.”

— Osama Awwad, Chief Technology Officer, Optimiz

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Benefits

Ultra-fast, Self-service Deployment

With Moogsoft’s self-service and provisioning, Optimiz was able to get up-and-running in just a few minutes. The self-service approach includes an intuitive interface and video tours of how to use the functionality needed for observability. Optimiz easily did its own integrations with the REST API and webhook. The solution guides teams through each step to add data from whatever tool is needed with a few clicks of the mouse. “Moogsoft was so easy to deploy and integrate, we got it up-and-running in no time,” says Awwad.

Automatic Correlation of Any Data for Noise Reduction

Noise reduction with Moogsoft has been a major benefit experienced by Optimiz. In order to reduce noisy alerts by up to 99%, the solution uses algorithms for event pattern discovery with correlation. By establishing logical connections between data from anywhere in customer technology stacks, Optimiz practitioners can instantly see clustered patterns related to issues affecting performance. The algorithms weigh data by factors such as text, time, and topology. The correlation of alerts helps SREs and DevOps practitioners to ensure that microservices, apps and systems are running at peak performance.

Enables Faster MTTI and MTTR to Meet Service Level Agreements

By using Moogsoft, Optimiz has been able to boost the efficiency and productivity of its practitioners. The rapidly deployable cloud architecture and self-service model has enabled acceleration of incident detection, cause identification, and outage prevention. The bottom-line result for key performance indicators is faster mean time to identify (MTTI) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) to meet customer SLAs. Fewer escalations with Moogsoft have also improved collaboration and knowledge recycling, which enables the Optimiz team to innovate more and operate less. “Our value proposition is helping customers to be satisfied on their digital journey,” says McIlwham.