BigPanda

1. Summary

BigPanda Autonomous Operations platform assists IT Ops, network operations center (NOC), and DevOps teams in the detection, investigation, and resolution of IT incidents. This is an AIOps solution, which combines AI, automation and IT systems management to allow IT operations practitioners, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams, execs, and managers to leverage AI as a force multiplier in streamlining IT operations.

By leveraging its Open Box Machine Learning, BigPanda helps users correlate the alert data streams being produced by infrastructure, applications, and services under management into insight-rich incidents. In addition, it automates incident management and unifies fragmented IT operations by providing a single-pane-of-glass for operations and reporting.

BigPanda customers include Intel, United, Turner Broadcasting, and State Farm. The tool is leveraged to reduce operating costs, improve service availability and performance, and de-risk and accelerate multi-cloud and traditional operations.

Market Position

While our assessment of the AIOps sector reveals vendors taking unique approaches, BigPanda, in our judgment, is ahead of most of its competitors. The company’s solution particularly excels at alert aggregation and event correlation, vastly improving the signal-to-noise ratio of IT alert traffic.

BigPanda goes a bit beyond what most might expect from an AIOps tool, providing integrations with ticketing systems such as JIRA, ITSM tools like ServiceNow, incident response tools like PagerDuty, and collaboration tools such as Slack. BigPanda reports that key clients, including a leading IPTV provider, rely on aggressive integration to tie together a wide range of IT tools and processes, and to break down operational silos that can slow response.

The value of this tool can be measured in preventing system outages and doing so proactively. In the past, manual processes around incident management meant that fixes were often slow in coming, and the process was reactive, meaning that the NOC engineers needed to wait for something to break in order to act.

BigPanda automates the detection of system issues, from minor to critical, cutting through the mounds of meaningless data to discern incidents and outages that engineers can act upon. By ingesting data from change management tools, BigPanda uses its intelligence to automatically correlate incidents with the application or infrastructure changes that caused them. This can produce welcome reductions in MTTx.

In fact, the value of BigPanda may ultimately be measured best in terms of avoided outages. For most organizations, BigPanda would produce positive ROI almost as soon as it prevents or fixes a system issue that materially impacts the business. This can easily add up to millions of dollars a year, as one large company discovered just 15 minutes after its BigPanda solution went live. The system detected and correlated a server failure that would have quickly grown into a P1 incident. Administrators were able to remediate the issue in minutes, with no impact on the business.

Keep in mind that the core benefit of any AIOps product is the abstraction layer—the ability to view and manage all systems using a “single pane of glass.” For example, a customer may use BigPanda to enable rapid remote operations, or to leverage automation to reduce manual ticketing and integrate with incident response tools like PagerDuty, ServiceNow and others.

Deployment Model

BigPanda is a SaaS platform, eliminating the need to install the tool on physical machines. The company employs a quote-based pricing model, which is tailored to the budgets of IT organizations for medium and large companies.