Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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.

Imagine you’re in the middle of a critical project, and suddenly, your system crashes. Or it’s the middle of the night, and your server goes down, affecting countless users. While no enterprise can avoid all IT incidents, how you handle them can significantly reduce their impact. Fast, effective IT incident management is critical, as major incidents are increasingly costly.

Every enterprise IT leader facing the spiraling complexity of modern IT environments has a version of the same conversation. How can we manage the increasing complexity of more services, more dependencies, and more layers of observability and monitoring? Their answer would add headcount to the NOC, sign another Global System Integrator contract, and buy your organization another year.

IT incidents are rarely isolated. A network disruption can trigger degradations in infrastructure, which can ripple and cause application errors and end up causing a flood of user complaints. When an L1 operator looks at a single incident, they see only part of the story. Outside their immediate scope, other incidents are actively occurring that are either directly related or impacted by the same underlying cause. Without broader visibility, there is no way to know.

As enterprise ITOps teams monitor increasingly complex, cloud-based, containerized systems, traditional observability practices are struggling to keep up. As IT infrastructure complexity increases, the typical response is to layer on more monitoring, logging, and instrumentation.

As enterprise ITOps teams monitor increasingly complex, cloud-based, containerized systems, traditional observability practices are struggling to keep up. As IT infrastructure complexity increases, the typical response is to layer on more monitoring, logging, and instrumentation.

Enterprise Management Associates found that major IT service outages are increasing in cost, frequency, and duration, with unplanned downtime costing large enterprises nearly $25,000 per minute, or $1.5 million per hour. When every minute costs $25,000, you can’t afford to waste engineering time on coordination tasks like creating channels, paging experts, typing summaries, and posting updates. An agentic AI-powered incident assistant can eliminate that waste and reduce bridge call costs.

Every enterprise depends on continuous changes to its IT environment. New code releases, infrastructure updates, configuration changes, and security patches are all crucial to support continuous innovation. These same changes are also a leading source of operational risk and one of the most common causes of failures at the network, infrastructure, and software layers, resulting in outages.

Enterprise ITOps leaders are realizing that legacy incident management processes are collapsing under the weight of today’s sprawling, hybrid-cloud enterprise environments. The fastest path from reactive firefighting to proactive, automated control is an agentic AI-powered incident assistant that can understand context, coordinate people, and take intelligent action at machine speed. Enterprise IT doesn’t look anything like it did even five years ago.