ManageEngine today introduced Spotlight, an AI-driven contextual recommendations engine, as part of the company’s upgrade of its Analytics Plus solution to version 6.0. Spotlight is designed to spot inefficiencies in IT operations and offer remediation strategies.

In its announcement, ManageEngine, a Zoho Corporation company, said Spotlight can give IT managers more immediate analysis of metrics and offer corrections to facilitate faster decision-making. For example, the statement said, “Analytics Plus can analyze correlations between the age of IT assets, their frequency of failure, and the mean time to repair. Based on these parameters, it suggests the optimal time frame for asset replacement. This approach ensures that organizations neither dispose of assets prematurely, losing usable value, nor retain them for too long, negatively impacting employee productivity.”

The AI engine in Analytics Plus studies common IT processes and watches them for inefficiencies such as bottlenecks, while offering corrective solutions.

“Organizations no longer want to spend hours mining data for actionable insights. They require ready-made strategies that they can implement immediately to see rapid results,” said Rakesh Jayaprakash, product manager and chief analytics evangelist at ManageEngine, in the announcement. He added, “There are sufficient tools in the market that promise automation and remediation for day-to-day network and application failures, but there’s a lack of focus on strategic decision-making. This is the gap Spotlight aims to bridge.”

In this 6.0 release, ManageEngine also in introducing a Root Cause Analysis feature to help IT managers and CIOs to make sure their decisions or changes are working.

Other features include the ability to create custom, no-code machine learning models, such as a model for predicting if certain factors or events will lead to more tickets having to be created. And a Unified IT Metrics Library brings all KPIs into a single view, making for easier search and reuse.

In addition to these key features, Analytics Plus version 6.0 includes a range of productive enhancements such as multivariate forecasting, workflow charts, support for distributed processing (on-premises) and more than 10 new integrations with popular IT tools.