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Meet Zia, ManageEngine’s new AI Assistant

ManageEngine has released Zia, a new AI Assistant, for its IT analytics solution Analytics Plus.

The company, which is the IT management division of Zoho Corporation, states the new assistant is able to interpret questions posed in plain English via text or voice to generate visualisations instantly, and offers smart suggestions based on keywords used in search.

On top of this, users can also train Zia to understand organisation-specific terms to get better results, ManageEngine says.

According to the company, there is a growing demand for tools that better enable IT teams as they are often time poor.

IT teams struggle to analyse historical data and improve processes because their time is largely taken up by dealing with network alarms or help desk incidents. Furthermore, teams that do have time analysis rely heavily on database administrators to mine relevant data and present it in a readable format.

In order to best respond to threats and identify opportunities, time is of the essence, ManageEngine says.

The AI assistant in the IT analytics tool helps IT teams including CTOs, network operations centre (NOC) personnel, help desk managers, technicians, and support engineers to access specific IT data regardless of technical expertise, ManageEngine says.

ManageEngine product manager Rakesh Jayaprakash says, “IT managers need access to instant insights that they can continue to refine and drill down into, without relying on database administrators.

"Zia makes it possible for non-technical users to analyse data without having to write SQL queries or programs, saving precious time that can be used to focus on improving the quality of IT services offered.

“In the future, we look forward to expanding the analytical capabilities of Zia to perform seamless data blending and provide automated insights.”

Currently, Zia can perform tasks including: creating KPIs and reports based on user questions, prompt keyword suggestions as users type or speak, and continuously learn and adapt to user requirements by analysing recent searches.

Alongside Zia, ManageEngine released predictive analytics in Analytics Plus, a new feature that aims to help NOC and service desk teams.

NOC teams can leverage Analytics Plus' predictive algorithms to anticipate service outages and network or application failures, as well as plan stop-gap measures, while service desk teams can foresee daily, weekly, and monthly ticket volumes and reorganise their workforce to avoid SLA violations, ManageEngine says.

Using predictive analysis, service desk managers can predict the probability of service outages and volume of incident tickets, monitor technician and asset utilisation in real time and allocate resources when needed and anticipate security threats to better plan patch deployment across the enterprise.

Zia and predictive analytics are both available at no additional cost in Analytics Plus.