Last year, almost 200 million people shopped on Black Friday. Online alone, they spent more than $9 billion. This holiday season, shoppers are ready to shop again and they’re prepared to spend even more.

Are your IT systems ready to handle any spikes and keep everyone jolly? Or are you worried that incidents—finicky apps, slow page loads or even downtime— might ruin the holiday spirit along with your bottom line?

Time and again, we see IT teams struggle to deal with seasonal spikes in demand and outages. This year’s Black Friday sale wasn’t any different. Outage monitoring platform Downdetector reported an 80% jump in people reporting issues with credit card payments. The culprit: some of the world’s biggest payment processing systems (Chase, Visa and Bolt) succumbing to outages. This resulted in a slew of declined transactions, frustrating millions of shoppers in the Americas and beyond. Such fiascos are an IT team’s nightmare— no one wants to be the IT person who let the systems go down on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

A great customer experience is critical to keep shoppers happy no matter when or how they shop. Opting for a “code freeze” approach—locking your website and infrastructure days or weeks before Black Friday—might be tempting. It will keep everything stable of course, but what does it eventually cost you? It’s an outdated and impractical practice for modern eCommerce and ultimately makes you less competitive over time. By implementing a code freeze, you also miss opportunities like optimizing to boost conversion. Plus, you run the risk of accumulating technical debt.

Instead of freezing your way through the holidays, consider taking a more proactive stance to diagnose, handle and react to outages during these peak periods (and all the time, really) with an AI-powered approach to incident management. An AIOps solution, one that applies artificial intelligence to IT operations, also helps you move away from the traditional “break-fix” method to incident management and keep your systems up and running no matter what.

One of the best use cases for AIOps is strengthening end-to-end system resilience by consolidating data from multiple sources and correlating events into incidents. This gives you clear visibility into the whole IT environment through dynamic infrastructure visualizations and opens the door for AI to suggest remediation actions. This real-time probable cause analysis enables ITOps teams to swiftly identify the underlying causes of incidents and take immediate action. The result is faster mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR).

To help you keep your systems ready, not just for the next holiday rush but all the time, consider IBM Cloud Pak® for AIOps, an event management and incident solution from IBM®. This robust event and incident management solution gives you end-to-end visibility into your entire IT estate—your cloud platform, operating system and the underlying infrastructure. Instead of being surprised when your online store or payment processing system start to struggle, IBM Cloud Pak® for AIOps gives you the power to preemptively detect issues, such as outages, allowing you to address them before they disrupt your customers’ shopping experiences.

With IBM Cloud Pak® for AIOps, you’ll be equipped to:

• Proactively identify issues: Stay ahead of potential outages during peak holiday periods by receiving timely alerts and notifications and take corrective actions before issues cause service disruptions.
• Monitor health and performance: Gain a holistic view of your IT environment, including platforms like Docker and Amazon Web Services, operating systems like Linux®, applications through solutions like Dynatrace or Instana®, and network data via solutions like SevOne.
• Streamline management: Configure, install and manage integrations easily to tailor IBM Cloud Pak® for AIOps to your specific needs. IBM Cloud Pak® for AIOps integrates seamlessly with monitoring tools and pretrained AI models to gain new insights from existing tools.

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With IBM Cloud Pak® for AIOps, arm your IT teams with the tools they need to stay battle-ready and take on outages during peak holiday seasons—before they disrupt your operations.

Learn how you can help to revolutionize IT operations and get more value and efficiency from your organization’s IT infrastructure.