We discussed log data and its analytics in the previous section. There are log-management tools and log analytics platforms to gain real-time information about all kinds of software and hardware systems. The insights emitted go a long way in stabilizing and strengthening various systems by proactively attending the systems issues. There is also operational data for all kinds of systems under operation. The data from IT systems contains valuable insights into system usage, the user's experience, and behavior patterns. There are operational analytics platforms and engines, such as Splunk software for monitoring, searching, analyzing, visualizing, and acting on massive streams of real-time and historical machine data, from any source, format, or location. The main advantages of operational analytics are listed here. Operational analytics helps with the following:

• Extricating operational insights
• Reducing IT costs and complexity
• Improving employee productivity
• Identifying and fixing service problems for an enhanced user experience
• Gaining end-to-end insights critical to the business operations, offerings, and outputs

To facilitate operational analytics, there are integrated platforms, and their contributions are given as follows:

• Troubleshoot applications, investigate security incidents, and facilitate compliance requirements in minutes instead of hours or days
• Analyze various performance indicators to enhance system performance
• Use report-generation capabilities to indicate the various trends in preferred formats (maps, charts, and graphs)
• Understand usage patterns, geographical trends, and learn about user and data loads
• Reduce mean time between failures (MTBF) by proactively addressing issues with real-time notifications 
• Get end-to-end visibility of the asset inventory, capacity allocation, and resource consumption

Thus, the operational analytics capability comes handy in capturing operational data (real-time and batch) and crunching them to produce actionable insights to enable autonomic systems. Also, the operational team members, IT experts, and business decision-makers can get useful information on working out correct countermeasures if necessary. The operational insights gained also convey what needs to be done to empower the systems under investigation to attain their optimal performance.