by Mohan Kompella | Feb 9, 2021

Cut the bull: what’s driving enterprises to switch AIOps vendors

Unlike apps on your phone that can be installed – and uninstalled – in just seconds, Enterprise applications and software tools require serious investments of time, energy and of course, money.

In exchange, enterprises hope to experience game-changing results that reduce operating costs, increase revenues, and/or move faster.

IT leaders are cognizant of this, which is why, after a careful and thorough evaluation, they invest in enterprise software…and start to wait for months, sometimes years, to start seeing the results, the payback and the ROI.

And that’s exactly why it’s particularly disappointing and disheartening for them when, despite the proverbial blood, sweat and tears, not to mention years and dollars, a tooling investment doesn’t pan out.

That brings us to Moogsoft…and the journey to AIOps

Many enterprises have been looking for ways to streamline IT Operations with AIOps. One of the earliest vendors to provide a solution was Moogsoft. Their on-premises software provided a way for organizations to use black box machine learning to reduce noise caused by dozens of monitoring and observability tools.

While there is no question about the value of AIOps, unfortunately, there were several “gotchas” in Moogsoft’s technology strategy: first, offering only an on-prem solution when the rest of the world was moving to SaaS; and next, the hidden time and costs of integrating tools into their system and updating the machine learning rules frequently.

Over the last year or two, a growing number of large enterprises across North America concluded that they couldn’t entrust their critical IT operations function to Moogsoft anymore,  and switched from Moogsoft to BigPanda.

In 2020, this trend has accelerated.

Strategic shifts at Moogsoft this year have left many customers to fend for themselves, prolonging deployments and creating runaway costs.

For all of those enterprises, BigPanda offers an alternative of rich engagement around its AIOps platform for event correlation and automation, which reduces operating costs, increases the performance and availability of critical applications and services, and accelerates business velocity.

But let’s go back a bit and take a look at the threads that are common to these enterprises’ switch from Moogsoft to BigPanda:

BigPanda: a real product “that just works”

BigPanda is laser-focused on, and purpose-built for, Event Correlation and Automation.

And because BigPanda strongly adheres to a pragmatic product/feature design, test and rollout philosophy, all BigPanda features, including those demonstrated in POVs, are immediately available to users in production.

In the words of BigPanda’s customers that migrated from Moogsoft to BigPanda, “BigPanda has a product, not just IP. BigPanda just works.”

BigPanda: based on a modern, SaaS-based architecture

BigPanda’s SaaS-native, microservices-based platform architecture

(a) provides built-in elastic scaling that can handle spikes in data volumes with no lag or degradation in performance,

(b) was architected from the ground up to support seamless releases. New code is rolled out to production gradually, behind a load-balancer, without affecting live users, and

(c) provides best-in-industry uptime and performance, and provides high-availability via built-in load-balancing, replication and backups.

Fortune 500 Technology Vendor: BigPanda reduces manual effort while standardizing the process and improving quality. Efficiency gains have enabled half of the 30-person team that used to support their legacy architecture (to which Moogsoft belonged) to be reassigned. Those staff members are now delivering strategic value to the company by enabling its emerging DevOps model.

Enterprises and their IT Ops, NOC & DevOps teams can rely on BigPanda 24x7x365 to handle any and all loads, with no latency, no disruptions and no downtime.

BigPanda: build your own integrations, quickly and easily (really)

Using 50+ OOTB integrations and powerful REST APIs for monitoring alerts, changes and topology, BigPanda can collect and aggregate data from all your monitoring, change and topology tools in real-time.

Fortune 500 FinServ Enterprise: With BigPanda, they are able to create new  integrations themselves – including an integration with ServiceNow, which Moogsoft had estimated as an $80,000 project.

To date, BigPanda has integrated with 300+ unique tools. On top of this, BigPanda’s SNMP agent lets you collect alerts (SNMP traps) from tens of thousands of IT systems and devices.

BigPanda customers routinely create their own integrations in just a few days, both in the POC/POV process, and in production.

BigPanda – high-quality correlation, results users can trust

BigPanda uses Open Box Machine Learning to correlate alerts, changes and topology data together to reduce IT noise by 95%+.

Users can change BigPanda’s ML-generated correlation patterns to ensure that the right alerts are always being correlated together.

Fortune 500 Global Gaming Giant: During an eight-week POV, BigPanda created parity with Moogsoft functionality that had taken over two and a half years to build up. The customer was also able to integrate their core monitoring pipeline with BigPanda in just a few hours. They even set up integrations like SolarWinds on the first day — integrations that had taken years to implement with Moogsoft.

Then, by not being overwhelmed and distracted by IT noise, informational events and false positives anymore, operations teams can catch evolving incidents (analogous to Moog’s “situations”) as they form, in real-time. This prevents those incidents from escalating into crippling outages.

BigPanda – tangible relief from “bridge calls from hell”, lower MTTR

BigPanda ingests and normalizes change data (new changes & updates to changes) from all enterprise change feeds/tools – including both legacy change tools/feeds, and new, cloud-native change feeds/tools.

BigPanda’s Open Box Machine Learning technology then analyzes these changes against existing BigPanda incidents in real-time, to identify and surface root cause changes right alongside that incident.

On top of that, BigPanda’s Real-time Topology Mesh creates a full-stack, real-time topology model that captures dependencies between networks, servers, clouds and applications. This lets BigPanda’s OBML technology correlate monitoring alerts against the topology model and surface the probable root cause of incidents with a high degree of accuracy.

This eliminates long and painful bridge calls, slashes MTTI and reduces MTTR.

Summary

When you invested in Moogsoft, you were trying to solve the pain of too much noise, too many incidents and outages, and too many tickets. You were trying to help your IT Ops, NOC, DevOps and SRE teams rapidly detect, investigate and resolve outages. You were trying to help your business deliver a superior customer experience, making it more competitive and profitable.

Those goals haven’t changed.

If anything, as your IT stack became more complex, as the number of tools in your environment increased, and as your organization embraced the cloud, you’re probably aware of just how much more important – and relevant – those goals have become.

With BigPanda, you can solve those challenges in a short period of time, and help move your business forward. To learn how other customers made the shift to BigPanda, click here.