Organizations have struggled for years with the problem of too much information. IT professionals can only address so many issues at one time, but many are faced with an overwhelming volume of alerts to try and review and prioritize. BigPanda thinks it can solve that problem with its event correlation platform.
If everything is an alert, then nothing is an alert. There has to be some way to separate issues and alerts that really matter so IT teams can prioritize efforts accordingly and address the concerns with the greatest business or security impact. At the same time, though, it’s crucial to minimize or eliminate both false positives and false negatives.
I spoke with Assaf Resnick, CEO of BigPanda, about the company’s approach to event correlation and why he believes organizations need what his company has to offer. Resnick described the current state and trends in IT infrastructure and IT development, noting DevOps principles and tools have transformed the entire data landscape.
Customers, he said, are asking themselves, “How do I move away from this monolithic application hierarchy that deploys once a quarter?” The goal, according to Resnick, is not just more reliable uptime, but delivering speed and agility at the same time.
The BigPanda platform doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, per se. In fact, it more or less relies on users having other wheels in place. BigPanda sits on top of what a company already has and pulls in data from other platforms such as New Relic or Splunk. It then normalizes and correlates that data so it can spit out results on a scale that mere mortals can comprehend. “Instead of 20,000 alerts from 15 different monitoring tools, I may only have 36 meaningful events,” Resnick said.
Playtika is one customer taking advantage of the BigPanda solution. Playtika is a digital gaming company that develops social casino games. According to a recent case study, “With BigPanda, Playtika was able to centralize all of its fragmented monitoring tools into a single unified platform that provides instant insight into the health of their IT systems. Moreover, by automatically correlating alerts from multiple systems into high-level incidents, BigPanda enabled Playtika’s IT pros to cut through the noise and quickly detect problematic issues. And as Playtika has acquired companies in recent years, BigPanda has allowed them to consolidate the operations management of these newly acquired companies virtually overnight, with zero migration cost.”
“We were struggling to work with many different tools in order to monitor the performance of our operations,” said Ella Vidra, director of IT Operations for Playtika. “Investigating alerts across our stack was tedious and time-consuming. We were at risk of missing critical errors that could impact production. BigPanda enables us to centralize our IT monitoring and quickly spot the issues that matter most.”
The proof is in the proverbial pudding, of course. There have been plenty of solutions that promise to streamline or simplify logging and alerting. It seems as though we now have solutions that are designed to streamline and simplify the results from the solutions that streamline and simplify other logs and alerts. Ultimately, what IT departments need is something that brings attention to major or critical issues so they can be prioritized without ignoring smaller or less crucial alerts at the same time. BigPanda thinks it can be that solution that helps companies pull together input from all sources and boil it down to a prioritized, manageable list.
