Operational Intelligence (OI)

What is Operational Intelligence (OI)?

Operational intelligence (OI) is the process of gathering and implementing data into an application instantaneously, so that information is immediately available to help maximize performance capabilities and user experiences. Operational intelligence is used to locate real-time opportunities in newly gathered information, improving application performance by allowing services to follow patterns and shortcut past learned behaviors. 

What is operational intelligence and what are the benefits?

Operational intelligence uses feedback to enhance performance, meaning applications learn. Think about your drive to work. The first time you drove, you (hopefully) followed the map and took the exact roads it suggested. Once you began driving to work more often, you started learning about different shortcuts and backroads to get there faster. As you did the task more, you got faster at it; this is the underlying intuition of operational intelligence. When applications can locate shortcuts using operational intelligence, they can work more efficiently, ultimately lowering operational costs.  

The critical component of operational intelligence is the instantaneous implementation of received information. Back to the example, let’s say when driving to work you have two routes: you learned it’s usually faster to take the highway, but taking a few backstreets when there is traffic is much faster. If you’re on the highway and you notice cars coming too slow, you can respond immediately by taking the nearest exit to the backstreets. This is how operational intelligence works: using signals to immediately adapt to the presented situation. The alternative would be driving to work on the highway the whole way, despite the traffic. Once the drive was over, you could look back on your commute and wish you had taken the backroads. Looking back when the moment is over and seeing you could have something different doesn’t create value. This can be taken back into the context of application. When applications can adapt in real time, they can optimize their resources and make informed decisions on how to best deploy services. 

Besides performance benefits, operational intelligence can also improve customer experience. Real time responses allow applications to personalize their services to specific users. This personalization is especially helpful for customer facing applications. When an application can identify content that a customer wants or would be interested in, the application can then tailor services to reach the customer’s objectives faster, increasing their overall engagement and satisfaction. 

What is the difference between business intelligence and operational intelligence?

Business intelligence is about using data analytics to influence or support future business decisions. Business intelligence uses information as insight to reflect on past business performance. This data collection therefore doesn’t provide immediate value. This differs from operational intelligence, where data, as noted, immediately provides value for performance optimization, even as it is collected. Business intelligence uses data to argue for certain business priorities but has no specific focus on actually optimizing infrastructure performance. 

What is the role of operational intelligence in the cloud?

Operational intelligence is especially useful in cloud computing because it can work in collaboration with cloud environments to achieve the visibility, scalability and cost optimization benefits that companies are seeking to maximize when they adopt the cloud. In the context of Java, operational intelligence can be implemented into the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). However, traditional JVM’s were not designed to operate in the cloud. This limits the advancements operational intelligence can make to cloud computing, ultimately preventing companies from reaching their goals of cost optimization and efficiency. Cloud native JVM’s can share information that is leveraged for insights and optimizations across JVM fleets. This feature of cloud native JVMs enables better operational intelligence capabilities because one JVM can receive data and communicate its learned feedback to improve the performance of entire JVM fleet. 

What is Azul’s role in operational intelligence?

Azul has long been a leader of Java innovation and is now taking JVMs into the cloud. Azul Platform Prime is the world’s only cloud native JVM and is designed to boost speed and scalability of Java deployments and reduce cloud costs by up to 50%. Azul Platform Prime increases performance and agility by leveraging powerful optimizations across entire JVM fleets, providing insight, visibility, and operational intelligence. Azul Platform Prime allows companies to forgo out of control cloud costs and slow application performance issues so that they can instead focus on creating a flywheel of profitable growth.