Qiniu Cloud's new intelligent operation and maintenance product release, why has it become a disruptive innovation in the industry?

On July 9, 2021, Qiniu Cloud, a leading domestic enterprise-level cloud service provider, held a new product launch conference in Shanghai to release its intelligent operation and maintenance product PISA.

PISA, namely Pandora Intelligent Service Analysis, is an intelligent service analysis tool developed by Pandora, a machine data analysis platform based on Qiniu Cloud. Qiniu Cloud defines PISA as a new application on Pandora, which shows that its significance to the industry and Qiniu Cloud itself is not trivial.

Pandora is a cloud-native machine data analysis platform launched by Qiniu Cloud. It provides the core ability to explore the value of data through the platform and AI algorithm capabilities. PISA is the application of this core ability in the field of intelligent operation and maintenance. Through PISA, Pandora's capabilities are fully utilized and open to developers, allowing operation and maintenance developers to more simply and flexibly use Pandora's capabilities according to their own business scenarios.

How is the opening of analytical capabilities achieved? In terms of architecture, PISA is divided into three layers: bottom, middle, and top. The bottom layer is based on the Pandora core computing engine, which outputs powerful, stable, high-performance, and low-cost computing capabilities. The middle layer relies on the Pandora open platform to provide developers with rich, open and easy-to-use support functions. The upper layer is the application layer, relying on Qiniu Cloud's rich AIOps experience to implement the application of intelligent operation and maintenance services to help end users flexibly respond to different business and IT operation and maintenance analysis scenarios.

Smarter smart operation and maintenance

Since the capabilities of Pandora can be exported through PISA, we have to talk about how the combination of PISA and Pandora can help the operation and maintenance of the enterprise in actual scenarios.

Take a practical scenario-a customer's telephone feedback of a problem with the bank's payment of utility bills as an example. The traditional way of handling is often that the customer service submits a work order to IT for operation and maintenance troubleshooting, the operation and maintenance troubleshooting issues, and the customer feedback results through the customer service. However, at this time, the failure has occurred, and the customer experience is hard to recover. With the help of PISA and Pandora, the entire bank's operation and maintenance system can undergo a fundamental transformation.

First, turn the post-processing into the pre-discovery. Still taking the above case as an example, before the customer calls, the bank's IT department can receive an alert that there may be problems with the payment service. Subsequently, compared to the traditional layer-by-layer and block-by-block operation and maintenance troubleshooting method, PISA can quickly find problems and repair faults through the business transaction health service analyzer.

The fundamental change that PISA brings to the actual operation and maintenance business process comes from the different way of thinking of Qiniu Cloud.

1. Get through business and operation and maintenance, and transform post-event processing into pre-discovery

In actual scenarios, business and operation and maintenance are often two separate departments. Due to professional requirements, business departments generally do not care about how the bottom layer of the system is implemented, and they pay more attention to delivery. At the same time, the two departments generally seldom communicate, and only get together to solve the problem when there is a failure or the business wants to obtain IT resources.

This has led to the fact that operation and maintenance has always been the company's cost center and the place where money is spent. From the perspective of profitability, it is natural that the smaller the money, the better the big things, but this also leads to an increase in the possibility of problems. But if the operation and maintenance can detect possible problems in advance, reduce losses for the company, and turn the cost center into a profit center, it is a better operation logic.

Qiniu Cloud believes that business and operation and maintenance must be connected, so that operation and maintenance can predict risks in advance and business can be carried out more stably and safely.

2. Open up operation and maintenance, only data exchange can repair faults faster

Failures may occur in every link of the IT system, but the existing monitoring and operation and maintenance systems often only focus on a certain level, such as the SkyWalking monitoring application layer and the Zabbix monitoring service layer. Therefore, it is very time-consuming and troublesome to investigate one by one.

Moreover, when the operation and maintenance department of an enterprise is subdivided into multiple responsibility lines such as application operation and maintenance, host system, network, DBA, etc., it is even more difficult to troubleshoot due to the non-interoperability of data. It is as if various departments cannot share clues when solving the case, which will inevitably delay the progress.

Therefore, the bottom thinking of Qiniu Cloud is that data must be aggregated. Qiniu Cloud was established in 2011. In the past ten years, the company's most important asset is its establishment of a unified heterogeneous data lake, which is also the basis for Pandora to be able to exert its power.

Heterogeneous data lakes are playing value

From the perspective of the company as a whole, Qiniu Cloud’s main business includes Media PaaS and Data PaaS, etc. All data will be aggregated into a heterogeneous data lake that is born out of a collection of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data.

Pandora is a machine data analysis platform that is responsible for analyzing data generated by any machine or system, such as data generated by servers, sensors, various applications, and network devices.

Pandora has three advantages. First of all, Pandora can achieve complete decoupling of computing and storage, and resources can change as needed.

Second, Pandora natively supports the ability to schema on read. Supports three analysis methods during collection, indexing, and searching. Analysis during search brings an extremely simple data access experience.

At the same time, Pandora uses SPL language for data analysis (SPL, the standard language for machine data analysis, SPL=SQL+Unix Pipeline). The SPL language has the capabilities of unified retrieval, analysis, visualization, and alarms, supports the direct processing of raw data, and is optimized for time series data.

Pandora's three advantages perfectly solve the problem of efficient and intelligent analysis of complex data, and also combine with PISA to bring answers to the disruptive innovation of intelligent operation and maintenance. The proactive discovery and data connection mentioned above is actually the result of the combination of the accumulation of heterogeneous data and the analysis capabilities of heterogeneous data.

In the era of industrial Internet, new sparks of intelligent operation and maintenance have erupted

On August 24, 2020, when the global online office was affected by the epidemic, Zoom was suspended for 3 hours. While causing inconvenience to users, it also questioned its growing momentum. For Internet and technology companies, the stability of services means the business itself, and its importance is self-evident.

Nowadays, in addition to the Internet itself, IT technology and intelligent technology have entered the deep water area. In industry and manufacturing, operation and maintenance is playing unprecedented effectiveness. Predictive maintenance, fault diagnosis, remote intelligent operation and maintenance, industrial data analysis...These relatively mature functions have been applied in factories, power systems, rail systems and other fields.

In these industries, various machines and systems are generating data all the time. "Data but lack of algorithms" is the norm in the industry. Therefore, how to collect and analyze machine data is the key to success in intelligent operation and maintenance for companies such as Qiniu Cloud. From this perspective, the combination of PISA and Pandora released today can be described as a move by Qiniu Cloud to stir up the industry.