Monq Lab releases FREE topology-based, low-code automation platform for enterprise

Monq Lab SIA, the leading AIOps developer, has released Monq Free Community Edition, the free version of its self-hosted topology-based AIOps incident control and automation platform for enterprise. Monq Free Community Edition — the industry’s only complete AIOps platform built on a topology database — can be installed on IT infrastructure and used at absolutely no charge. Using machine learning and advanced correlation, the platform decreases the noise level up to 95% and boosts the speed of incident resolution to 60%. The reduction in downtime results in huge revenue savings and improved customer satisfaction. Monq Lab recently received a personal investment from Ratmir Timashev, the former CEO and co-founder of Veeam, the leader in data protection.

AIOps incident control and automation technology is radically changing the way IT teams operate. It detects impending incidents and anomalous IT behavior, and then low-code automation frees teams from manually performing the necessary rectification tasks. An associated benefit is that this process is much faster than the traditional approach, so downtime is reduced by at least 50%, leading to greater profit from reduced costs and the increased revenue thanks to uninterrupted business activity.

Another issue is that the pandemic has driven businesses of all sizes to digitize their services, and the need to provide customer support has added to the burden on their IT teams. AIOps keeps digital businesses running smoothly in modern, very complex hybrid IT environments by automating incident management.

But existing AIOps platforms are either comprehensive but outrageously expensive, or affordable but hard to use despite offering limited functionality. On-premise AIOps software has so far been available only to the select few such as telcos, banks and large retailers that are willing and able to shell out more than $1 million a year for the technology. As the on-premise segment accounts for 70% of the AIOps market, the emergence of free, on-premise AIOps software is very important.

So Monq Lab addressed all of these concerns by developing Monq Free Community Edition, an all-encompassing platform that is easy to integrate and manage, yet is absolutely free to teams running relatively small-scale infrastructure. And enterprises can use it to satisfy themselves that Monq really does deliver the benefits, without having to go through a complex procurement process.

Monq Free Community Edition is a simple yet powerful root-cause analysis and incident management platform for proactive IT systems observability. It is the industry’s only full-featured, free AIOps topology-based automation platform that analyzes data from different monitoring systems, automatically discovers topology (essential in today’s highly dynamic IT environments where, for example, virtual servers and microservices are started and stopped automatically), controls application and infrastructure health, provides rapid root cause analysis, and starts incident remediation processes built on a low-code engine.

All this is done keeping security at the forefront.

AIOps applies the enormous amount of operational data that is available, but the volume and continuing growth of this data means it can be hard to manage. Monq Free Community Edition is uniquely built on the ClickHouse real-time analytical column database, as used by ebay, Spotify, Uber and Yandex.

Because ClickHouse is an open-source column-oriented DBMS (columnar database management system) for online analytical processing (OLAP), it allows generating analytical reports using SQL queries in real-time. Besides the fastest query execution performance, ClickHouse’s other important characteristics are scalability, user-friendliness and security.

Monq is designed with a microservices architecture for flexibility and scalability. And while most systems of this class on the market are little more than advanced chat rooms with some automation, Monq employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Machine Learning (ML) technologies to combine events into clusters. Monq Lab’s system is the only free AIOps platform that uses topology data to combine events, providing very accurate results and predictions.

Monq Free Community Edition has a flexible, open and extensible architecture. Customers can quickly build their own integration or use an existing one with or without customization. Business processes and services health data can be fed from Dynatrace, Instana, AppDynamics or other sources including synthetic tests. An IT environment’s topology can be discovered in less than three minutes from VMware vCenter or Kubernetes, and instantly linked to a modern infrastructure monitoring tool such as Zabbix, Prometheus, or DataDog, among others. The result is a complete health map of all IT layers, and quick root cause analysis when incidents occur.

This simple and powerful AIOps platform for detecting and preventing IT failures in complex, dynamically changing IT environments helps site reliability engineering (SRE), DevOps and IT Ops professionals by providing quick and simple root-cause analysis and troubleshooting.

Monq’s AIOps automation platform has been shown to reduce downtime by 50% and user complaints by 84%. It also increases the efficiency of root-cause analysis and the speed of investigation of IT incidents by 70-95%. These improvements deliver tangible benefits to organizations in the form of increased IT productivity and reduced interruptions to business caused by downtime.

Large enterprises — including banks, telecoms or retail industries with large distributed IT structures involving 10+ monitoring systems and 20+ people in IT support teams — no longer need to spend enormous amounts of time at their monitors and mobile phones handling emergency events and alerts, as they can now be automated and monitored by Monq. These enterprises can use the Free Community Edition at no charge to prove the suitability and value of the technology.

And SMEs and other organizations with simpler IT environments can use Monq Free Community Edition on an ongoing basis to gain similar benefits. The only significant restrictions on the free version are that the number of configuration items and the number of tests per day are both limited to 100.

Monq Labs is not resting on its laurels. Within the next two weeks, all users of the free version will have access to an upgrade that contains a low-code automation engine, and by the end of February a new and even more user-friendly configuration item database (CMDB) with customizable types of inventory and items, customizable lifecycle and new interfaces will be available to users.

Then early spring will see the release of a case management subsystem combining all the noise reduction and root-case analysis features, taking them to a whole new level of user-friendliness.

Nikolay Ganyushkin, CEO and founder of Monq Lab, commented “Monq’s platform increases the productivity of the IT service by more than 60% at the start and strives to move towards autonomous operation. This is a great result leading to business continuity and customer satisfaction.

“Dispatching, like detection, classification, localization, prioritization, routing and elimination control will be handled by AIOps systems rather than dozens of engineers in front of hundreds of monitor screens. This change in the industry can be compared to the transition from the manual labor of telephonists in the early 20th century to a PBX with automatic dialing. AIOps is disrupting the IT industry, and we want to be at the forefront of this disruption, to become the #1 AIOps solution worldwide.

“Thanks to AIOps and Monq, businesses can dramatically reduce incident management and NOC costs, freeing money and resources for other strategic digital initiatives.”

Availability

The technology is available for download at https://monqlab.com/download free of charge.