Observability and AIOps are a perfect pairing. The reason is that Ops teams are constantly having to deal with 3 challenges.
- How do you monitor and observe the system?
- How do you interact with, and query the system?
- What would you do in order to remediate, based on what you’ve been told about the problem?
The goal with Selector AI is to allow you to tackle for big challenges:
- Interacting with the platform using natural language rather than complex query language
- High granularity and long retention to ensure you have the right level lf detail, for the right amount of time, consolidated with context
- Bring the information to where you work (e.g. Slack, Teams, ITSM, ServiceNow)
- Render meaningful answers about the system by understanding dynamic context
We are seeing some strong use-cases across a few different business verticals that make sense based on the size and diversity of those environments.
Price is not based on the amount of data or the number of users. It is primarily based on managed objects. There will be a lot of questions around this, but like that they start with an aim of transparent, use-case based pricing.
Multi-Cloud is Real, and a Real Challenge
Modern apps are likely spreading across clouds in one way or another. It could be a simple application that is connecting to APIs and services from elsewhere, or even applications that may have to live in multiple clouds as a single application.
Understanding the issues within the cloud is challenging enough. It’s finding a needle in a haystack sometimes. Make it a mutli-cloud deployment and it is what the Selctor team so aptly called a needle in a stack of needles.
First, how do we know what is where? Then we have to understand how health is defined inside and across the cloud environment.
With multi-cloud you are now having to correlate and reconcile a disturbing amount of data and possible source points for issues.
Proactive and Interactive
This is where the fun begins. Moving from being a collector that you scan through to a proactive observability tool is where Selector starts to shine. They also have Slack-native integration that lets you see what’s happening as it is happening.
The alerts also tell you where there as remediation options which lets you know where to head for the fix rather than having to immediately log in and start sifting through network logs.
The first message has nearly all you need to act with remediation. The screens above screenshots that we can ask a question of the system which
What got raised early in the discussion is that these AI-infused details and actional recommendations are not GenAI. In other words, Selector is using AI and machine learning to define the correlation of activity and signals to the potential root cause.
Talk to your Networks
You had me a “chat with my infrastructure”. This is the way that I love seeing infra ops heading. The idea that you can not just ask a question of the system
Because Selector is a proactive system, they also trigger outbound ticket generation or alert to send to a SIEM or SOAR environment.
Moving from Observability to Actionability
This is where the proverbial rubber hits the road. It’s great to see what’s happening, and why. But then what? The Selector correlation engine comes in to shine here as it identifies the most likely cause based on the totality of data, then gives you the chance to see the top number of potential causes of the issue.
The ticket generation to your ITSM kicks in and we can continue to interact with the incident report and add more knowledge. Being able to add addtional context to the problem based on your understanding of the business impact, or application names, can be a huge boost for accuracy of the system going forward.
The new augmented knowledge-infused Selector alert can then pull you towards a visualization of the issues. When something happens that needs attention, the dashboards are generated dynamically based on what is affected. This is a huge gain over a lot of the traditional tooling for obserbabilithy and monitoring which requires you to know what “could happen” to build dashboards in advance.
Trigger Warning! What was the Triggering Event?
Imagine you get the alert about an issue. Wouldn’t it be great to know that someone in Ops just made a config change? Selector also maps changes to configs and system events that could trigger the issue and adds it to the correlation engine.
The UI is slick in how it shows you both the issue that occurred and can also give you what changed, where, and even a diff of the config changes.
AI Integration in the Right Way
A hot button among techies is always whether generative AI is being used safely. What are the points in the system where AI is purely algorithmic evaluation, and where are you generating additional information based on those captured metrics.
How does Selector AI Select the “right” Data?
Any data you have can be discovered and consumed by Selector. There is intelligent retention which will reduce the amount and granularity over time once it has built the right baseline for inferring changes adn anomalies going forward.
Ingestion can be done with built in integrations as well as a customized declarative ETL that Seletor provides to learn about how to ingest and evaluate signals and data that may not be natively known yet. This is where you can really get fun with adding additional business-level data to enrich the system.
What’s Inside the Selector AI?
Knowing where the data lives, and what is happening to it is key with platforms like Selector.
The data is held in a single-tenant deployment in your cloud of choice or on-premises. The models and AI engine used to help drive the actionable insights can also be customized to use your private AI platform. This was great to see out of the box.
The Selector Story is Very Interesting
The purpose of observability was to go above and beyond monitoring. Observability is about being able to ask a question of the system, based on its inputs. So rather than “how is SQL425 performing?” you really want to say “How is Sunrise performing?” where SQL425 may be a part or the Sunrise business application.
There is a lot more to see and we had a great interaction with the Selector team. I look forward to finding out more and sharing a deep dive here.