AIOps can cut repetitive triage and speed investigation. It cannot replace service ownership, clean telemetry, or tested runbooks. This report separates production use cases from autonomy theater.
Why it persists: Duplicate alerts, inconsistent tags, missing ownership, and unstable baselines create noisy models. Events that occur together are not always causally related.
What recovers it: Begin with repeated, low-value alert noise. Automatically collect recent changes, owners, dependencies, dashboards, similar incidents, and runbooks.
The teams that understand the business meaning are better placed to own data quality and change. Central platforms should provide the tools and guardrails, not become the semantic bottleneck.
A usable product includes definitions, access, freshness, quality, lineage, examples, support, and change policy. The table is one component.
Consumers need a consistent way to discover, evaluate, request, and use products. Without a common contract, every product becomes a custom integration.
Write the job in plain language: who needs what decision or workflow, how often, and what happens when the data is late or wrong. This anchors scope.
Define owner, interface, schema, business definitions, access model, freshness, quality, support, and change policy. Make the contract machine-readable where possible.
Expose freshness, tests, incidents, adoption, repeat consumers, query patterns, and support volume. Consumers should be able to evaluate fitness without asking the owner.
Interview high-value consumers, observe failed discovery and access attempts, and prioritize friction that limits repeat use. Usage should shape investment.
Data products get used when they reduce uncertainty. Consumers know what the data means, whether it is fit for the job, who owns it, and what will happen when it changes. Do not start with the marketplace.
No. Promote assets to products when they serve repeat consumers and justify ownership, service levels, and lifecycle management.
Owner, purpose, interface, definitions, access, freshness, quality, support, and change policy.
Repeat consumption by target users, paired with time to successful use and support burden.
The domain team closest to the meaning and business use, supported by a central self-service platform.
Eventually, if the number of products and consumers justifies it. A catalog is not the first milestone.
