Your infrastructure is evolving, but is your operational framework still stuck in the past?
Major service outages are becoming more frequent, more severe, and taking longer to resolve. According to recent survey data, the average organization reports 86 outages per year, totaling 324 minutes of weekly downtime. Over half (55%) experience weekly outages, while 14% report daily outages.
Reactive incident management is no longer sufficient to address the rise in incidents, so IT operations (ITOps) require a makeover. A mature operational framework is needed that aligns people, processes, and technology around proactive prevention and remediation.
Organizations are always looking to streamline processes and workflows, but they often don’t know where to start.
This framework can have a transformative impact. However, achieving this level of operational maturity is difficult due to rising IT infrastructure complexity, sprawling tool suites, and limited automation. Organizations are always looking to streamline processes and workflows, but they often don’t know where to start.
Here are four steps ITOps teams can take toward creating a mature framework that enables proactive, resilient operations:
Step 1: Standardize workflows with golden paths and templates
As organizations scale across product lines, regions, and customers, maintaining a consistent approach to incident management becomes increasingly difficult. A lack of consistency increases cognitive load and slows response times for human responders because services are built, deployed, and supported in various ways.
Golden paths address this challenge by providing pre-approved, reusable workflows that guide ITOps teams from A to B. These paths define organizational best practices for actions such as service deployment, alert configuration, and incident response. Golden paths also help enforce security, compliance, and reliability requirements without slowing delivery. Additionally, they eliminate the problem of fragmented responses across large, distributed teams that might react differently to an incident.
Step 2: Build continuous learning into operations
Operational maturity requires a culture of continuous learning and the use of insights from operational data to reduce repeat incidents. Observability enables this learning loop by providing reliable, end-to-end evidence of how systems behave in production. With correlated signals across metrics, logs, and traces, teams can detect issues earlier, diagnose root causes faster, and identify recurring patterns around incidents.
Those same signals are what make blameless post-incident reviews effective. Armed with data, teams can reconstruct what happened, understand contributing factors, and turn findings into concrete improvements to runbooks, workflows, handoffs, and automation. Over time, this cycle steadily increases baseline resilience rather than repeatedly reacting to the same incidents.
Step 3: Accelerate incident resolution with AI and automation
AI and automation are fundamental elements of a mature ITOps framework.
According to PagerDuty data, organizations that adopt automation report significant reductions in the time spent on incident management tasks and less stress and burnout. Automation can handle repetitive, time-intensive tasks such as logging, routing, and enrichment, freeing engineers to focus on higher-value actions.
Mature teams also design systems for continuous, safe iteration by implementing safeguards such as feature flags for phased rollouts and canary deployments that expose changes to a small subset of users before full release, making it easier to recover quickly if something goes wrong.
AI-driven workflows further improve incident management by analyzing alert patterns, suggesting likely root causes, and supporting triage decisions. These capabilities help teams diagnose issues faster and reduce the chance that localized problems cascade into major incidents.
Step 4: Deploy AI agents across the incident lifecycle
The final step introduces AI agents.
AI agents move operations beyond rules-based automation to systems that reason, act, and learn across the incident lifecycle. Agents can act independently to identify and triage issues, trigger failovers, and remediate known incident patterns. These agents continuously refine their behavior based on outcomes, enabling engineers to respond faster with less manual effort and on-call fatigue.
AI agents don’t replace the existing operations model. They complement it in a way that allows human engineers to focus on oversight and improvement instead of repetitive tasks.
The adoption of AI agents is already underway. Research shows that 75% of organizations are deploying multiple AI agents within operations. Practical examples include site reliability engineering agents that learn from prior incidents, automatically surface relevant context, and execute diagnostics and remediation.
Other agents can transcribe calls to generate real-time summaries and status updates in Teams or Slack, automatically detect and resolve scheduling conflicts, or surface proactive recommendations so ITOps teams can anticipate issues ahead of time.
Building operational resilience and confidence
A mature operational framework reduces the tradeoff between the twin pillars of modern operations: speed and reliability. When organizations embrace a mature ITOps framework, teams can ship, test, and scale software with confidence that the organization has the resilience and responsiveness to absorb change without disruption.
