WEC Energy Group reduces MTTR with full-context operations

WEC Energy Group is one of the largest electric generation, distribution, and natural gas delivery holding companies in the United States. Based in Milwaukee, WEC services 4.7 million customers across four states and employs approximately 7,000 people within its energy companies and service subsidiaries.

Challenge

  • Mergers and acquisitions led to a proliferation of alerting redundancies and tool sprawl.
  • Disparate tools restricted visibility into both the network and mission-critical applications, impeding access to the comprehensive alert context needed to identify and solve incidents.
  • Reactive incident management reduced available resources for strategic projects.

As a utility company supporting customers distributed across Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota, WEC Energy Group is trusted to ensure its customers’ utility needs are met as safely and as consistently as possible. To that end, it is critical that its IT operations are as reliable as possible to provide maximum uptime and service reliability.

Following an acquisition, WEC needed to address the increasing tool sprawl and alert volume that accompanied the operational complexities of M&A activity. Significant variations in ITOps tools, data, alerting, and resolution processes left operators with an overwhelming volume of IT noise — lacking context, normalization, and formatting.

Solution

WEC Energy Group needed a way to deliver a unified, full-context view of all its alert data to proactively identify priority incidents, reclaim bandwidth for strategic initiatives, and reduce overall mean time to resolution (MTTR). The company chose to partner with BigPanda for its AIOps platform to unite distributed tools and services under a centralized first pane of glass for comprehensive IT visibility.

Benefits

BigPanda successfully reduced WEC’s post-acquisition IT clutter by automating the removal of duplicate and redundant alerts. This enabled teams to accelerate the identification and prioritization of alerts and evolving incidents based on relevance, impacted services, and business urgency. As a result, responders could proactively address issues before they escalate to a critical level. WEC successfully transformed numerous events into a cohesive set of correlated alerts capable of accurately identifying actionable incidents, irrespective of their source.