Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Quick Answer A Network Operations Center (NOC) — pronounced “knock” — is a centralized physical or virtual facility where IT professionals monitor, manage, and maintain an organization’s network infrastructure on a 24/7/365 basis. The NOC serves as the nerve center for detecting incidents, coordinating responses, and ensuring maximum network availability and performance.

We recently brought together IT operations leaders from across financial services, healthcare, airlines, media, and other industries for BigPanda 26, our annual customer event. The theme that emerged above all others during the event’s conversations is that our industry is no longer debating whether AI belongs in ITOps. The debate now is about how quickly it can be implemented, how to measure it, and who’s accountable when it acts. Here are some key learnings from BigPanda 26.

Hashicorp's co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto decided to pull out his Ghostty project from GitHub in April 2026 due to GitHub's reliability issues. He did this after 18 years of using GitHub, saying that GitHub "is no longer a place for serious work". GitHub has experienced a significant decline in reliability over the past 6 months, and Hashimoto is not alone in expressing this sentiment.

A Playwright Check fails at 2 am. The login flow is broken. Until today, that alert triggered a human to get up, open the Checkly dashboard, copy Rocky AI root cause analysis (RCA), and then tell an agent to get to work. There were two AI agents, one incident, and no way for them to talk to each other. The extended checkly checks and new checkly rca CLI commands close that gap. Your coding agent can now pull Rocky AI's analysis into its ongoing work, read the diagnosis, and go fix the code.

Monitoring tools track what’s happening across your systems and send a Slack message or email when something looks off. But they don’t call anyone and they don’t escalate the incident. If that Slack message goes unseen at 3 AM on a Saturday, the incident just sits there until someone opens their dashboard. Incident alerting fills this gap. When an incident triggers, it contacts the right person directly through a phone call or their preferred channel.

It’s 2 a.m. An alert fires. You acknowledge it, pull up the monitoring dashboard, and immediately hit a wall: Which team owns this? What services does it impact? Worse: this is the third time this month you’ve been paged for the same issue, and you still don’t have a clear path to fix it. What should take minutes stretches into hours of Slack threads, escalation guesswork, and frantic context gathering.

Digital services are the engine of your modern business, but keeping them running feels like a constant battle. The rapid increase in the volume and speed of operational data is a direct result of growing architectures and more intricate workloads. Alert fatigue is causing your teams to be slow and reactive in addressing incidents, and this is a surefire path to burnout. The pace of this new reality is beyond what traditional, human-led processes can match.

Schedules are a core part of any on-call system. In ours, they define who to page and when. But people use them in lots of other ways too: checking their next shift, asking for cover while at the gym, keeping a Slack user group up to date, or updating a Linear triage responsibility. For many of our customers, they’re one of the main ways they interact with our product, and as they’re such a foundational part of On-call, it’s very important they work well.

The incident is over. The service is back up. The monitoring dashboard is green, the on-call engineer has stood down, and the post-incident review is on the calendar for Thursday. But there is a question that separates good operations teams from great ones: do you actually know what that incident cost you in terms of reliability commitments? Whether you breached an SLO. Whether a customer-facing SLA is now at risk.