Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Most people assume the modern enterprise runs cleanly on the dashboards and cloud consoles that dominate today’s digital workspaces. Anyone who operates these environments understands a more complicated truth. The real work happens beneath those surfaces, in systems few people notice until something slips. Across industries, engineers face the same recurring scenario: a routine shift disrupted by signals of degradation somewhere in the environment.

When an incident occurs, an L2/3 engineer or SRE can spend 20–30 minutes investigating across alert consoles, combing through change records, and pinging teams on Slack or Microsoft Teams. When you multiply that time spent across thousands of incidents per year by the cost of an IT outage at $14,056 per minute, the cost is staggering. Enterprises can’t afford to waste time searching across disparate tools.

Operations teams have lived with the same frustrating tradeoff for years: the data exists, but getting to the right answer often takes too much time and too much expertise. Engineers are expected to know platform-specific query languages, navigate layers of dashboards, and understand exactly where the right visualization lives before they can even begin troubleshooting. That approach can work in smaller environments, but as infrastructure grows more distributed and complex, it becomes a bottleneck.

Enterprise VPN health monitoring is harder than it should be. Most enterprise VPN environments look something like this: On paper, everything is “covered.” In reality? VPN performance issues are still hard to diagnose.

If service-centric observability provides the control layer, the next question becomes more urgent. What happens when organizations pair context with automation that operates inside clear defined boundaries? During conversations at Nexus Live 2025, leaders did not describe automation as a futuristic aspiration. They described it as a necessary progression. However, the distinction they drew was important. Automation without context accelerates activity.

We recently brought together IT operations leaders from across financial services, healthcare, airlines, media, and other industries for BigPanda 26, our annual customer event. The theme that emerged above all others during the event’s conversations is that our industry is no longer debating whether AI belongs in ITOps. The debate now is about how quickly it can be implemented, how to measure it, and who’s accountable when it acts. Here are some key learnings from BigPanda 26.