Power Protection FEATURED ARTICLE

Everyone is dependent upon electricity.  Businesses, schools, governments, hospitals, and homes all rely on their utility companies to deliver consistent, reliable power so they can function normally.  Inevitably, though, power outages happen, whether due to storms, animals, accidents, or other unpredictable reasons.  Too often, however, outdated equipment causes power systems to fail, creating difficulties and even putting lives in danger in extreme circumstances.

While not all outages can be avoided, modern technology is available to utilities that will help them minimize the impact from outages, accelerate restoration processes, and maximize uptime for customers.  Salt River Project, one of Arizona’s largest utilities serving nearly a million customers, understands the challenges outages present – for customers as well as for its own operations.  Just last week, some 19,000 of its customers lost power when a monsoon hit the Phoenix area. 

To help ensure dependable service, SRP relies on a complex IT infrastructure to manage its utility grid and applications and resources.  But, it was using a legacy platform that wasn’t able to deliver the visibility or automation SRP needs to keep its delivery network operating at maximum efficiency at all times.  That’s why it has adopted ScienceLogic’s SL1 AIOps system, which will enable SRP to have accurate, real-time service-level views across its applications and infrastructure.  The increased visibility will allow SRP to increase its situational awareness and incident response times, providing a higher quality of service to its customers.

“Rather than being reactive to events, it is important for us to grow a platform that will transform monitoring to bring proactive insights, leveraging AIOps and machine learning,” said Kevin Carlson, Senior Director, Information Technology Services at SRP.

A continuous flow of data into its new AIOps platform will allow SRP to leverage real-time information to more accurately identify problems, reduce false alerts, and increase its ability to resolve issues for customers.

“Salt River Project operates at a vast scale, putting pressure on IT operations to keep up with the correspondingly high volume, variety, and velocity of service tickets. IT operations are tasked with maintaining infrastructure and ensuring critical business application performance, and must be able to automatically resolve incidents and maintain uptime for customers,” said Dave Link, founder and CEO of ScienceLogic (News - Alert).  “To that end, it is critical that the CMDB (configuration management database) is fed accurate and context-rich data to achieve true business service visibility and contextual insights in real time.  With SL1, Salt River Project can run operations more efficiently and effectively to significantly improve service quality and customer satisfaction.”

While its new technology won’t be able to eliminate all outages, it will allow it to more effectively manage them and reduce downtime.  But, because outages are still going to happen, and because there’s always a chance of power fluctuations, businesses should also take precautions to protect their own infrastructure by installing power protection systems.  These systems are designed to eliminate risk of damage to business technology from surges and spikes, ensuring systems will come online properly once power is restored after an outage.  SRP and other utilities are doing their part to minimize outages, but businesses have to take protecting their own technology investments into their own hands.

To learn more about how AIOps is helping business increase their operational efficiency and maximize their IT operations through artificial intelligence and machine learning, don’t miss AIOps Expo 2020 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, February 12-14, 2020.  Part of the TechSuperShow, AIOps Expo will deliver an experience to help business and IT leaders understand how data, analytics, machine learning, and AI can be used to automate IT tasks and maximize infrastructure and application performance.