ITOps

IT operations, abbreviated ITops, encompasses the practices, teams, and tools used to run an organization's information technology services and infrastructure on a day-to-day basis. The aim is to ensure reliable, secure, and available IT services through continuous monitoring, incident response, and routine maintenance. ITops sits between the development of software and the end-user experience, focusing on operational stability rather than feature development. It interacts with IT service management frameworks such as ITIL and with modern approaches like DevOps and SRE to align operations with business goals.

Core activities include managing physical and cloud infrastructure, coordinating application operations, and maintaining the service environment. Key processes cover monitoring and event management, incident response, problem management, change and release management, configuration management, capacity planning, backup and disaster recovery, and security operations. Automation and standardization are central, as they help reduce toil and shorten recovery times. Roles typically involve service desks, network or system operations centers, platform engineers, and automation specialists, who collaborate with development teams to keep services available.

Tools commonly support ITops, including monitoring and observability platforms, log management, IT service management systems, configuration management databases, automation/orchestration tools, and cloud management platforms. Metrics emphasize availability, mean time to recovery, error rates, change success rates, and adherence to service level objectives. Trends include observability, AI-enabled operations (AIOps), proactive remediation, and cloud-native operations, as organizations pursue more resilient, efficient, and scalable IT operations.