New benchmark report shows enterprises can cut event noise by as much as 99.9% and use event management data to drive observability stack consolidation.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 8, 2025 — BigPanda, a leading provider of agentic IT operations solutions, today released its inaugural Monitoring and Observability Tool Effectiveness for IT Event Management report. Its findings reveal crucial insights into how enterprise monitoring and observability tools are performing—and often falling short—offering IT leaders a new, data-driven approach to consolidating and optimizing their observability stacks.
Based on analysis from 130 enterprise organizations using the BigPanda platform, the report highlights a stark imbalance: the average enterprise sends 9.6 million observability events annually to BigPanda, but fewer than 1 in 5 (18%) are ever acted upon. Compounding the issue, 27% of alerts occur on weekends, creating unnecessary pressure on already overburdened on-call teams.
“The research confirms what many IT leaders already suspect,” said Fred Koopmans, Chief Product Officer at BigPanda. “More monitoring coverage doesn’t automatically mean more actionability. Enterprises are investing heavily in observability, but without context, correlation, and enrichment, the signal gets lost. That’s where BigPanda comes in—turning noise into insight and action.”
The case for observability tool consolidation
The report features a monitoring and observability tool effectiveness matrix that shows no tools combine both widespread usage and consistently high actionability. This signals that even the strongest platforms have room to grow, and the observability industry is still evolving toward optimal performance at scale.
Other key trends and insights for purpose-built monitoring tools and observability platforms include:
- Full monitoring coverage doesn’t equal value. Most enterprises are drowning in data, creating millions of events (9.6 million, on average) annually. Yet only 18% of incidents were actioned on average, underscoring the disconnect between the belief that comprehensive observability coverage of applications, services, and infrastructure equates to better ITOps, incident management, and customer outcomes.
- Some high-coverage tools fall short on signal quality. Tools like LogicMonitor and Zabbix contributed a large share of incidents, yet struggle with their lower actionability, highlighting that high usage does not necessarily translate to high operational value. These scalable but noisy tools may benefit from improved configuration and tuning to reduce noise and enhance the precision of alerts.
- Full-stack observability is still an illusion. Despite the notion that enterprise organizations are centralizing and consolidating observability with full-stack observability tools, our data shows that enterprises still have a median of 20+ tools they use to monitor on-premises and cloud infrastructure, application and digital experience monitoring.
- Open-source remains low-impact at enterprise scale. Despite their popularity among developers, most open-source observability platforms and monitoring tools have yet to deliver high-value, enterprise-grade observability outcomes. Our report shows they frequently produce low-quality signals rather than actionable insights.
- Purpose-built monitoring tools tend to align as either specialists or stragglers. They either fell in the top-left quadrant (optimized, high-performance tools), like PRTG and SolarWinds Pingdom, or the bottom-left quadrant (underutilized tools), like Cisco ThousandEyes and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM), with lower adoption and weaker signal quality. This indicates that while some purpose-built monitoring tools deliver substantial niche value, others have yet to evolve into broader observability assets.
These results highlight a clear opportunity for IT leaders: consolidate around high-performing tools, decommission low-value ones, and use enriched event data to guide smarter investments.
Alert enrichment boosts actionability
Most (82%) organizations achieved at least 97% noise reduction with BigPanda, and over half reduced noise by 99.5–99.9%, showing the power of deduplication, filtering, correlation, and suppression when properly implemented with a unified AIOps platform.
Organizations enriched 60% of alerts with context data for all incidents, but enriched 77% of alerts linked to actioned incidents. This comparison indicates that enrichment from configuration management database (CMDB), cloud and virtualization management, service discovery, and application performance monitoring (APM) tools significantly improves alert quality and operator confidence.
“Adding context to enrich alert data leads to more effective prioritization, resulting in faster problem resolution and fewer service disruptions.” — Paul Bevan, Research Director of IT Infrastructure, Bloor Research
The full 58-page report, complete with a monitoring-tool effectiveness matrix, is available for download.
| View the Full Report |
Report methodology
The Monitoring and Observability Tool Effectiveness for IT Event Management report is based on data gathered from the BigPanda platform in 2024. Demographic and firmographic information is based on ZoomInfo data from March 2025.
BigPanda anonymized and aggregated the relevant data to give a general overview of the effectiveness of monitoring tools and observability platforms, as well as event management benchmarks. Security-sensitive details and data have been excluded.
About BigPanda
BigPanda delivers agentic automation for ITOps. We enable enterprises to keep the digital world running by transforming manual and reactive human processes into intelligent, autonomous systems that detect, respond, and prevent IT incidents at machine speed. That’s why the world’s most trusted brands rely on BigPanda to improve operational efficiency and deliver exceptional service reliability to their customers.
Learn more at www.bigpanda.io.
Media contact:
Adam Blau
650-240-7272
adam@bigpanda.io
