AIOps is Dead. Long live AI enabled Event and Incident Management

Back in September 2020 I wrote a paper titled “Event Correlation and Automation – The Valuable Heart of AIOps”. At the time many IT Operations Management vendors were jumping on the perceived AIOps bandwagon and claiming that their platforms and solutions were “AIOps”. My Spotlight paper was an attempt to identify and characterise what AIOps was, and what it wasn’t. In my opinion at that time, there were only a small number of vendors who had genuine AIOps solutions, two good examples being BigPanda and Moogsoft.

But the tide had already come in and, in common with plenty of other IT terms such as Cloud or Observability, AIOps was used so broadly as to cover a multitude of sins. During the intervening period I have been keeping up to date with the whole IT Operations and Service Management market.

About 18 months ago I took one of my regular update briefings with Big Panda and noted a significant change in its positioning and direction. Blair Sibille, Field CTO at BigPanda, talked passionately about the way it was re-architecting its whole approach to data and the potential impact Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) on the challenge of making sense of the tsunami of event data that IT operations teams face, and the tantalising potential of genuinely predicting outages and performance degradation before users reported them.

18 months on, its experience of using the LLM with the addition of the correlated alerts from its existing, comprehensive set of monitoring integrations, has shown real benefits to IT Service Management (ITSM) teams. Traditionally, BigPanda collaborated closely with IT Operations (ITOps), Network Operations Centres (NOCs), DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams. However, Blair stated that, the addition of correlated and enriched information being passed to ITSM tools at the ticket production stage had resulted in BigPanda sales teams engaging far more with ITSM Departments and, in particular both Incident and Change Management teams.

To maximise the benefits to ITSM, BigPanda integrations have allowed users to share incidents with their co-workers through other systems such as Jira or Slack. They have allowed BigPanda to receive change notifications from users change systems, such as CloudTrail, Jenkins, ServiceNow, and Jira. And, importantly, they have allowed users to enrich alerts coming into BigPanda with topology information from configuration management, cloud and virtualisation management, service discovery, APM, and CMDB tools. On this final point Blair noted that BigPanda was now able to automatically identify missing Configurations Items (CI) in CMDBs helping to resolve an age-old bugbear of keeping them up to date in such a fast-moving environment.

Fundamentally, what BigPanda has done is to provide GenAI powered incident management, called BiggyAI, that surfaces and automates insights from your IT. This has gone beyond mere improvements in incident resolution, it is shining a brighter light onto existing ITSM and related business processes, prompting change and further improvement.

With Dell recently buying Moogsoft and many of the other big IT companies and ITOM platform providers acquiring or building broader and broader functionality, it might appear that BigPanda is now in a market of one. Undoubtedly others will move to use LLMs to improve Incident Management. However, I believe that BigPanda’s early move, and it’s laser like focus on the correlation and enrichment of both event and incident management will be a key differentiator for the time being.