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Transform initiatives

Remote IT operations

BigPanda was built for remote IT operations and distributed teams

BigPanda is scalable and designed to meet the needs of enterprises with large amounts of IT alerts, remote teams, and users. Our platform consolidates critical data needed to resolve incidents using Open Box Machine learning, providing operations teams with communication and collaboration options to quickly resolve incidents and outages.

Why enterprises have moved to remote IT operations

Today, most companies are living the reality of 100% remote and distributed IT operations, with no end in sight. In most cases, enterprises found themselves at this juncture overnight with no playbook for how to successfully move from NOCs.

In the meantime, the stakes are higher than ever before to acquire and retain customers. Demand for products and services is still at a healthy level, especially for “at-home” industries (media, streaming, gaming, ecommerce), where demand has increased tenfold.

Operations teams must continue to keep critical applications and services healthy and performant and serve customers while they figure out how to successfully continue to detect, investigate and resolve incidents and outages without the benefit of working side-by-side in a 40-monitor NOC.

The challenges of remote IT operations

On-prem tools create lags

Problem

On-premises IT Ops tools suffer latency and performance issues

It’s difficult to access on-prem event correlation, monitoring and other IT management tools, which often require VPN for secure connectivity. The problem is significantly more pronounced when dozens or hundreds of users across the US or the world all need to access the same tools in parallel, creating unbearable latency and performance issues.

Negative impact on your business:

Increased operating costs:

  • On-prem IT Ops tools suffer latency and lag issues, it’s an impediment to remote IT Ops, NOC and DevOps teams handling incidents quickly. This increases downtime and downtime-related costs.
  • Because remote IT Ops teams using on-prem tools are not as productive as before, additional headcount may be required to handle the same volume of incidents as before, increasing costs.
  • Similarly, because enterprises are under tremendous revenue & margin pressure, they may be forced to furlough employees or even reduce headcount. But because customers must still be served, this can keep IT Ops costs at an unacceptably or unbearably high level.

Performance and availability problems: Remote operations teams relying on on-prem IT Ops tools can’t quickly investigate and resolve incidents. Applications and services suffer from degraded performance and availability.

BigPanda’s solution

BigPanda’s SaaS-native platform works at scale

Hundreds of IT Ops, NOC and DevOps team members spread across the world can remotely and reliably access BigPanda’s SaaS-native platform, and use it to handle incidents 24x7x365.

Since March 2020, several BigPanda customers that provide digital entertainment and gaming services to hundreds of millions of users around the world – whose traffic has increased manifold – have been reliably using BigPanda to serve their users, while dozens of team members remotely access BigPanda at the same time with no lags or performance issues.

Positive impact on your business:

Reduced operating costs: BigPanda keeps remote and distributed IT Ops team members as productive as when they were onsite, and helps them handle high and/or spiky volumes of IT alerts and indents with ease, keeping costs firmly in control.

Performance and availability problems: By helping remote teams continue to quickly and easily handle large volumes of IT alerts and incidents, BigPanda improves performance and availability as always.

No clear view of environment

Problem

Get a consolidated view that drives insights and actions

Remote operations teams had access to multiple consoles and screens in NOCs and Command Centers to provide them full situational awareness. Now being remote, they may have the ability to see one, maybe two monitors at a time. This limits their at-a-glance situational awareness. Constant switching of screens and tabs is disruptive and cognitively taxing.

Negative impact on your business:

Performance and availability problems: Because remote IT Ops, NOC and DevOps teams have to rely on just 1-2 monitors when they’re remote and working from home, they lack the situational awareness they had when they were in the NOC surrounded by multiple monitors and consoles. This makes it more difficult to detect, investigate and resolve incidents/outages than before. MTTR takes a hit.

Decreased business velocity: Enterprises are under enormous revenue and margin pressure in this economic climate. Delivering extraordinary customer experiences is becoming hugely important to retaining customer loyalty and business momentum. Not being able to resolve incidents and outages rapidly could slow down business recovery and momentum.

BigPanda’s solution

Lack of consolidated views and shared situational awareness

BigPanda (a) brings together all the critical data that IT Ops, NOC and DevOps need to resolve incidents: alerts, changes & topology data, into a single platform, and (b) uses Machine Learning to correlate these three datasets (alerts, changes & topology) into context-rich incidents that can fit on, and be consumed from, a single screen.

These teams can therefore continue to be productive while still being 100% remote and continue to rapidly detect, investigate & resolve incidents/outages.

Positive impact on your business:

Performance and availability problems: By helping remote and distributed operations teams easily and intuitively visualize incidents and outages in a single console, BigPanda ensures rapid investigation and resolution. This improves performance and availability.

Decreased business velocity: By helping remote and distributed operations teams minimize the frequency and duration of incidents and outages, BigPanda helps enterprises meet and exceed customer expectations, cementing customer loyalty. This helps sustain business momentum and recovery during this challenging economic climate.

Remote collaboration is tricky

Problem

Accelerate incident response and resolution with real-time communication and collaboration

For CIOs and IT execs, it’s a challenge to ensure that remote operations teams have the tools to successfully collaborate and communicate. Many of these teams, and their workflows, were fine-tuned for environments where different NOC shifts and teams were co-located alongside each other, with line of sight access to managers or experts to whom incidents could be escalated, as needed.

Negative impact on your business:

Increased operating costs: Without effective communication and collaboration within and across operations teams, incidents and outages take longer to resolve, driving up downtime related costs.

Performance and availability problems: Because effective communication and collaboration between IT Ops, NOC and DevOps teams is a problem with a 100% remote team, incidents may fall through the cracks or get stuck in different stages of the incident management lifecycle. This makes MTTR worse.

BigPanda’s solution

Struggles with communication and collaboration across distributed operations teams

BigPanda aggregates monitoring, change and topology data from all enterprise tools, uses ML to correlate these datasets, and presents them to IT Ops, NOC and DevOps teams in an intuitive format.

This creates shared situation awareness and helps focus every team member on the right incidents at the right time – regardless of where each team or team member is physically located.

Then, BigPanda lets these teams take a number of different actions on incidents (assign, snooze, comment, share, search, route, escalate, etc.) This makes it easy for teams to communicate and collaborate with each – no matter where they are located.

Finally, by sharing incident information with other teams and their collaboration tools, BigPanda unifies otherwise fragmented workflows. Again, the right team can work on investigating & resolving incidents regardless of which tools they use or where they are located.

Taken together, these capabilities allow remote IT Ops, NOC and DevOps teams to be as productive as ever before, and successfully serve their customers around the clock.

Positive impact on your business:

Reduced operating costs, and improved performance and availability: By making it easier for remote and distributed operations to communicate and collaborate with each other on incidents and outages, BigPanda reduces friction and boosts productivity. This results in fewer and shorter incidents and outages. Downtime and downtime related costs are reduced.

Read the IDG 2020 State of IT Operations report and find out what’s creating the biggest disruptions for IT teams.

Download report