Get your IT team ready for the next holiday.

Last year, nearly 200 million people shopped on Black Friday. More than $9 billion was spent online alone. This holiday season, shoppers are ready to shop again and spend more.

Are your IT systems ready to handle surges and keep everyone entertained? Or are you worried that things like finicky apps, slow page loads, and downtime could ruin your holiday spirit along with your profits?

We often see IT teams struggling to handle seasonal demand spikes and outages. This year’s Black Friday sales were no different. DownDetector, an outage monitoring platform, reported an 80% surge in people reporting problems with credit card payments. Cause: Some of the world’s largest payment processing systems (Chase, Visa, Bolt) are out. This resulted in numerous transactions being rejected, disappointing millions of shoppers across the Americas and beyond. These failures are an IT team’s nightmare. ​​No one wants to be the IT guy whose systems are down on Black Friday or Cyber ​​Monday.

A great customer experience is critical to keeping shoppers happy, no matter when and how they shop. It can be tempting to take the “code freeze” approach, locking down your website and infrastructure in the days or weeks before Black Friday. Of course it keeps everything stable, but at what cost in the end? This is an outdated and impractical practice in modern e-commerce and ultimately reduces competitiveness over time. Implementing code freezes can also lead to missed opportunities, such as optimizations that increase conversion rates. Additionally, there is a risk of accumulating technical debt.

Instead of being stuck during the holidays, consider taking a more proactive stance to diagnose, address and respond to outages during these peak periods (actually all the time) with an AI-driven approach to incident management. AIOps solutions, which apply artificial intelligence to IT operations, can help you move away from traditional “breakfast” approaches to incident management and keep your systems running no matter what.

One of the best use cases for AIOps is to strengthen end-to-end system resilience by integrating data from multiple sources and correlating events to incidents. This provides clear visibility into the entire IT environment through dynamic infrastructure visualization and opens up opportunities for AI to suggest problem-solving actions. This real-time probable cause analysis allows ITOps teams to quickly identify the root cause of an incident and take immediate action. The result is faster mean time to detection (MTTD) and faster mean time to resolution (MTTR).

To keep your systems ready not only for the next holiday, but always, consider event management and incident solutions from IBM® (IBM Cloud Pak ® for AIOps and IBM AIOps Insights). These powerful event and incident management solutions provide end-to-end visibility across your entire IT assets, including cloud platforms, operating systems, and underlying infrastructure. Instead of being surprised when your online store or payment processing system begins to struggle, AIOps Insights proactively detects issues like outages, giving you the ability to fix them before they disrupt your customers’ shopping experience.

IBM event management and incident response solutions help you:

• Proactively identify problems. Receive timely warnings and notifications to avoid potential disruptions during peak periods and take corrective action before problems cause service disruptions.
• Health and performance monitoring: Get a holistic view of your IT environment, including platforms like Docker and Amazon Web Services, operating systems like Linux®, applications through solutions like Dynatrace or Instana®, and network data through solutions like SevOne.
• Simplify management: Easily configure, install, and manage integrations to customize AIOps Insights to your specific needs. AIOps Insights integrates with existing ChatOps platforms like Slack to provide IT operations teams with insights directly where they work and delivers clear recommendations using explainable AI.

Getting Started with an AI Approach to Incident Management

IBM event management and incident response solutions can help you provide your IT team with the tools they need to stay combat-ready and handle outages before peak season disruptions occur.

Do you want to transform your IT operations and get more value and efficiency from your organization’s IT infrastructure? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of IBM AIOps Insights.

Learn more about IBM AIOps Insights