AI Operations Glossary

Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations — the application of AI and machine learning to automate and enhance IT operations processes including event correlation, anomaly detection, and root cause analysis.

Mean Time to Recovery — the average time required to restore a system or service after a failure. A key operational metric that AI-driven operations can significantly reduce.

Mean Time to Acknowledge — the average time between an alert firing and an engineer acknowledging it. Automation can reduce this to near-zero for known incident patterns.

Mean Time to Detect — the average time to detect a problem after it begins. Enhanced observability and AI monitoring reduce this from hours to seconds.

Site Reliability Engineering — a discipline that applies software engineering practices to IT operations, focusing on reliability, scalability, and automation.

A documented procedure for handling specific operational tasks or incidents. Runbook automation converts these manual procedures into executable workflows.

Configurable rules and policies that define the boundaries within which automated operations can execute, ensuring compliance, safety, and control.

A security practice where elevated access permissions are granted only when needed, for a limited duration, with automatic revocation — minimizing the attack surface.

An operational model that brings IT operations into collaboration platforms like Slack or Teams, enabling teams to execute and monitor operations through conversational interfaces.

The ability to understand the internal state of a system from its external outputs (logs, metrics, traces). Goes beyond traditional monitoring to provide deep system insights.

Managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes, enabling version control and repeatability.

A group responsible for evaluating, prioritizing, and authorizing changes to IT systems. AI-driven platforms can automate routine CAB decisions while escalating high-risk changes.

Manual, repetitive, automatable operational work that scales linearly with service growth. A key target for automation in SRE practices.

The potential scope of impact when a change or incident affects a system. Governance guardrails help limit blast radius through staged rollouts and automatic rollback.

Role-Based Access Control — a method of regulating access to resources based on the roles of individual users, ensuring least-privilege access and separation of duties.