Bryan Woodworth, principal solutions strategist at multicloud network technology firm Aviatrix, says that predictive network technology will advance rapidly over the next few years. It already helps resolve network issues quickly and efficiently. “AI can correlate alerts and error conditions across many disparate systems, discovering related patterns in minutes or even seconds, something that would take humans hours or days,” he says.

Predictive network technology can also drastically decrease the number of false positives tucked into log and error analyses, leading to more intelligent and useful alerts, Woodworth says. “You can’t heal from something you don’t detect,” he says. “For example, before you change the network to route around a problem, you must know where that problem is.” Self-healing networks based on AI and ML provide better recommendations on how to recover from errors and avoid outages.