The artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platform market is moving faster than can really be imagined, both in terms of vendors as well as the capabilities that make up AIOps solutions. This was driven by a continued increase of unmanageable data volumes and continued desire for business insights.

To address these changes since the last Forrester Wave™ on AIOps two years ago, Forrester published the AIOps Reference Architecture, which defines the 18 functions required to deliver AIOps solutions. Additionally, we published guidance on the different perspectives of how to approach AIOps to address a growing organizational need to help put AIOps into practice.

The Forrester Wave™: Artificial Intelligence For IT Operations, Q4 2022 is focused on technology-centric AIOps solutions, which was a key element of the entry criteria in addition to single-code base and/or UI, stand-alone product, and domain-agnostic interoperability. Operationally aligned and process-centric AIOps vendors were not included in this research but will be highlighted in future Forrester research efforts.

Evaluation Criteria And Participants

As with all Forrester Wave research efforts, the evaluation looks at criteria within the vendor’s current offering, strategy, and market presence. For this research, 25 capabilities were grouped into seven categories to evaluate the vendor’s current offering:

In total, 35 different capabilities across the three major sections were used to evaluate 11 vendors: Datadog, Digitate, Dynatrace, Elastic, LogicMonitor, Micro Focus, New Relic, OpsRamp, ScienceLogic, Splunk, and Zenoss. For a full working model of all 35 criteria and the associated weightings, download the full model linked at the top of the Wave report in the right-hand panel.

This AIOps research pushed vendors to demonstrate the ability to provide business-focused insights through both native and third-party capabilities. The 35 capabilities addressed challenges that organizations are facing with today’s hybrid environments that span from the end user experience to the back-end mainframe and on-premises infrastructure. The objective of the evaluation was to identify which vendor could differentiate itself the most with strong offerings across all 35 capabilities, not just a subset of capabilities.

And The Winner Is …

All vendors demonstrated very strong offerings but not always across all 35 capabilities. For example, a vendor might offer a capability with a third-party integration but not natively. It might offer great technology modeling but not business modeling. Certain strengths might be desirable to some organizations with those particular needs but not others. These are just high-level scenarios that demonstrate the importance of identifying the right pairing of vendor strengths to the right organizational needs.

The vendor best able to demonstrate a strong and differentiating offering across all 35 capabilities was Dynatrace. It consistently demonstrated the ability to offer leading or near-leading capabilities that provide organizations the most flexibility when implementing AIOps. The full report, The Forrester Wave™: Artificial Intelligence For IT Operations, Q4 2022 goes into a lot more depth on the capabilities of each provider and how they stack up against the rest of the market.

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