Global IT disruptions and outages are becoming the new normal, testing the operational resilience of businesses everywhere. How well prepared your team is to handle major incidents determines how fast the business can return to normal. Operations Centers are relied on to manage these disruptions and ensure quick recovery. They’re the point of entry for incoming data that holds important signals of impending failure that impact customers, the business, and the bottom line.

Today, businesses are increasingly reliant on their ability to provide uninterrupted service and respond swiftly to any disruptions. Whether it's a website outage, a malfunctioning application, or hardware failure, downtime can significantly affect a company's operations. Customers expect quick resolutions, and delays can result in dissatisfaction, loss of trust, and ultimately, business failure.

What comes to mind when you hear that an IT component has “five 9s availability”? Five 9s availability of >= 99.999% is the peak metric for IT availability. Five 9s predicts that a measured component — whether it is a server, communication line, app, service, or any other item — will be available at least 99.999% of the time during a specific period.

By breaking down the silos between observability, IT operations, and service management, teams can improve service delivery and enhance IT incident management. However, this is more easily said than done. The average BigPanda customer uses more than 20 observability and monitoring data sources. Combining mountains of alert data with legacy event management systems can make it almost impossible to sift through the noise to find the most important alerts.

While major outages like the recent CrowdStrike incident dominate headlines, those of us in the trenches ensuring Internet Resilience know that most of our issues are not necessarily global but localized by geography, autonomous systems, or something else. Micro-outages – those elusive, localized incidents – can pose the most persistent threat to observability.

A few weeks ago we released a feature on IncidentHub which gives you a historical view of your monitored services' availability.

There’s a major outage. Support tickets are mounting. Everybody from engineering to legal is scrambling for information. You have more Teams notifications clamouring for attention than you do minutes to address them, and it’s hard to know where to begin. What comes next is a balancing act—mitigating the impact, updating colleagues, managing action items, or updating a status page that will be seen by millions.

Advances in generative AI are rapidly transforming the IT operations landscape. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, 85% of organizations use or plan to deploy AI across many functional areas, including ITOps. AIOps platforms can apply advanced GenAI to quickly identify an incident’s root cause, impact, and recommend steps to resolution. When fed the correct information, AIOps gives IT teams immediate access to context-rich insights.