Virtusa, a global provider of digital strategy, digital engineering and IT services and solutions, held a five-day virtual Managed Services AIOps Hackathon to explore the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in the realm of IT operations. 

Remote participation of teams from Virtusa offices across Sri Lanka and India – including teams with members from multiple locations – was facilitated through a hybrid hackathon model.

The hackathon provided participants with an observability platform, enabling teams to explore the implementation of real-world AIOps use cases via industry-leading tools and products such as Dynatrace, Splunk, NewRelic, Datadog, AWS and Gremlin. This comprehensive approach encompassed aspects such as Real User Monitoring (RUM), Application Performance Monitoring (APM), and Distributed Tracing for a microservices-based application virtually running off AWS compute. 

Prizes were awarded across a number of categories, including Best End-to-End Implementation, Best Observability Implementation and Best Presentation, with cash prizes, certificates and medals awarded to the winners in the presence of Senior Virtusa Leadership. All hackathon participants were presented with Certificates of Participation, along with the opportunity to participate in future AIOps-related learning and development programmes. 

Through strengthened AIOps capabilities, large volumes of data can be ingested, multiple sources of data integrated and events correlated, in order to detect and resolve anomalies to support more efficient IT systems. These capabilities play a pivotal role in improving key performance metrics in IT Incident Management such as Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). 

Virtusa’s overarching objective eventually is to develop assets and an AIOps framework that will pave the way for predictable, resilient systems, a key component in promoting the concept of reliability engineering. This will empower SREs to spring forward with these reusable assets while also demonstrating the significant benefits of AI-enabled operations to the prospective clients.

“Events such as this Managed Services AIOps hackathon encourage us to focus on innovating future-ready solutions for real-world use cases and we are grateful to Virtusa for giving us this chance to showcase our talent and recognise our efforts during this thrilling five-day event. It was truly a memorable experience and we look forward to more such opportunities,” overall winners Team Datadog, led by Kumaraguru Sugunan, comprising Fayaz Thahir and Pasindu Rathnayake, commented.