Do you feel you’re always playing catch-up with incidents? If so, you’re not alone. As IT environments become more complex, alerts keep piling up, and finding the root cause feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. And ITOps and incident responders are left scratching their heads and wondering: what went wrong? It can be frustrating when you don’t have end-to-end visibility into your systems. This is where observability comes in.

Your ITOps and Incident Management teams face thousands of alerts daily. How can they find the “needle in the haystack” to prevent critical alerts from escalating into incidents that impact users and customers? This challenge plagues modern IT departments as alert noise, fragmented data, and chaotic workflows extend response times and undermine service reliability.

BigPanda was honored to be a premier sponsor of Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference (IOCS) in Las Vegas, Nevada. This event allowed us to showcase the latest BigPanda capabilities, connect with industry leaders, and gain valuable insights into the future of IT operations. For those who couldn’t attend, here are the three most impactful insights from my conversations with the customers, vendors, and analysts at IOCS 2024.

Modern IT environments are complex and interconnected, making observability essential for maintaining system and application performance. The challenge is not just about ensuring systems run smoothly; it’s about understanding the complicated web of data, services, and user interactions that drive your operations. This is where observability comes into play. Observability offers a deeper understanding of why issues arise in the first place.

Today, every enterprise is digital. Regardless of industry, every business must incorporate digital technologies and strategies into its operations to remain competitive. Maintaining reliable IT infrastructures and digital services while minimizing downtime due to unplanned outages is critical to business success.

Are your IT systems underperforming due to incomplete or outdated data? In ITOps, where quick and accurate decision-making is critical, raw data alone can limit efficiency. Data enrichment adds the context needed to turn basic data into a powerful source of actionable insights.

Managing modern IT environments is becoming more complex and fragmented as organizations rely on a broader range of applications and services, including cloud, hybrid infrastructure, microservices, and legacy systems. This complexity and velocity surpass human capacity and old processes, making it challenging for IT teams to respond efficiently to incidents.

The handoff between IT operations (ITOps) and incident management is often chaotic. NOC operators receive an overwhelming deluge of noisy low-priority alerts, which prevents them from detecting actionable, important alerts. This delay causes tickets to pile up, SLAs breached, and unnecessary assignments and escalations to L2 and L3 engineers. Concurrently, L1 analysts react to user-initiated tickets with little to zero context, forcing them to escalate the issues.

Can generative AI help improve IT efficiency? Imagine you’re part of an IT team constantly juggling a growing number of support tickets, system issues, and daily maintenance tasks. It can feel like you’re always playing catch-up. It’s a common challenge: Repetitive tasks and troubleshooting waste valuable time, leaving little room for innovation or strategic improvements. Generative AI (GenAI) for IT provides a solution.

During critical incidents, teams often scramble to pull data from multiple sources, wasting precious time and delaying issue resolution. Manual processes hamper response and create blind spots that can lead to costly oversights. Data integration addresses this head-on. Data integration collects incident management information from various sources, such as monitoring tools, logs, and user reports, into a unified system.