Salt River Project, one of Arizona’s largest utility providers, recently adopted ScienceLogic’s SL1 platform—an AI-driven IT operations (AIOps) automation engine—to update and monitor the organization’s complex IT infrastructure. The SL1 platform enables Salt River Project to provide more reliable and faster service and increase customer satisfaction for the utility’s nearly one million users across a service area spanning three counties, including most of the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. Below is a conversation between Kevin Carlson, senior director of information technology services at Salt River Project, and Dave Link, founder and CEO of ScienceLogic, highlighting how this cooperation will continue bringing benefits in the future.
MPT: What can you tell our readers about Salt River Project who aren’t familiar with it?
Kevin Carlson: Salt River Project serves approximately one million end users across a service area that spans three counties, including most of the Phoenix Metropolitan area. To support that scale, Salt River Project relies on a complex network of IT infrastructure and applications to ensure comprehensive coverage at all times. The adoption of SL1, an AIOps automation engine, will allow Salt River Project to attain real-time visibility and greater situational awareness across its complex IT environment to provide more reliable service and increase customer satisfaction.
MPT: What were some of the needs specific to Salt River Project’s IT?
Kevin Carlson: As a public power utility, Salt River Project acts in the best interest of our customers and our community. IT plays a role in maintaining the reliability, resiliency, and performance of critical systems. 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.
Dave Link: SRP’s IT infrastructure plays a key role in maintaining the reliability, resiliency, and performance of vital systems, and the maintenance of critical service, ranging from network connectivity issues to customer outages, requires next-generation tools to best optimize response time and performance. ScienceLogic is helping facilitate Salt River Project’s transition and modernization to this next-generation AIOps monitoring system in order to improve data collection, increase operational efficiency, and guarantee service quality.
MPT: What role can AI play in improving customer satisfaction?
Dave Link: Better incident response times require IT operations to continuously synchronize configuration management database (CMDB) with real-time information throughout the monitored environment, so the CMDB is accurate and up-to-date whenever changes occur. Salt River Project can now identify any inconsistencies across their environment for accurate and enriched problem management. Furthermore, SL1 enables Salt River Project to leverage its maintenance window for ticket automation, reducing false alerts and boosting the IT operations team’s productivity.
MPT: What were some of the challenges to this project?
Dave Link: 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. To that end, it is critical that the CMDB is fed accurate and context-rich data to achieve true business service visibility and contextual insights in real-time.
MODERN PUMPING TODAY, September 2019
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