I’m a big fan of historical TV dramas and last week I finished watching the stunning and shattering HBO TV miniseries about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. As a monitoring expert and a product manager, I have visited dozens of IT operations centers, control rooms and NOCs, so I couldn’t help but compare them to the Chernobyl control room scenes in the show.

I hear it all the time when talking to future BigPanda customers; “I’m not sure BigPanda can really help me correlate all these alerts together because our CMDB is very immature.” Or sometimes, they don’t even have a CMDB, and incorrectly assume this disqualifies them from meaningful noise reduction and alert correlation. I’m happy to tell you the same thing I tell the folks who are looking at BigPanda for the first time. “No CMDB? No problem!”.

Usability and control are key elements in BigPanda’s Operations Console, where IT Ops, NOC and DevOps users investigate and take action on IT incidents. Let’s take a look at how BigPanda’s powerful Split Incident and Merge Incidents features provide IT Ops with an added layer of control. BigPanda’s Open Box Machine Learning correlates and enriches the overwhelming amount of alerts IT Ops needs to deal with into a reduced number of insight-rich incidents (often 95% fewer).

AppDynamics recently announced its new Integration Partner Program, and BigPanda is proud to be an inaugural member. The ten select members of the program have all strategically integrated with AppDynamics in support of its AIOps-focused vision, based on Cisco’s Central Nervous System for IT. We’ve been partnering with AppDynamics for quite some time now, and our inclusion in the partner program is both a natural evolution and an endorsement of our leadership in IT Operations and AIOps.

The Evolve Leadership and Technology Conference, hosted by our partner Trace3, saw over 1,300 IT execs gathering at Caesar’s Palace for two days of world-class keynotes and insights into the latest trends and technologies of the IT landscape.

A lot has been written about the ever-elusive “Single Pane of Glass” (or SPOG). From calling it a myth like BigFoot or The Loch Ness Monster , to reporting that “a centralized, service-centric view into IT environments has become a must-have capability for IT Operations” (2018 Digital Enterprise Journal Study), both opponents and proponents admit that the implementation of a centralized view into IT Ops is a real need, but at the same time, a major operational challenge.

I joined BigPanda a year ago yesterday – and I can truly say it’s been one of the most intense and exciting years, both personally and professionally. A roller-coaster ride of PG activities, POVs and nourishing partnerships with our prospects and customers. And looking back at all that I’ve gone through, one of my strongest takeaways is that while our product is amazing and our POVs are rock solid, in the end it’s the people who tip the scales.