Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A single hour of unplanned downtime can cost a mid-sized enterprise more than $300,000, according to ITIC report. Most of that cost comes from one place: teams find out about the problem after users do. That is the core limitation of reactive monitoring. It tells you something has failed, but doesn't tell you something is about to fail. This guide is for IT operations leads, platform and SRE engineers, and IT directors deciding how to evolve their monitoring practice.

This major update introduces enhanced analytics and dashboards, expanded AI-powered assistance, and a wide range of usability improvements across the platform. Experience a smarter, more intuitive Alloy Navigator.

There is plenty of talk about the value of Digital Employee Experience (DEX). But how can you use it a typical day? Do organizations need a DEX specialist? And what about AI — must you master the art of prompting? During a casual conversation on the road to HDI Support World in Las Vegas, Dave Wagner (Almaden executive) and Bob Kruger (Chief Product Officer) answered these questions directly. Below are their key insights, preserved exactly as they shared them.

Are you spending more time figuring out whose problem it is than actually fixing it? If that feels familiar, you are not alone. Many IT teams start their day with multiple dashboards and tools, yet still struggle to understand what is wrong when something breaks. Everything may look fine in one view, and fine in another, but the customer impact tells a different story. Incidents end up taking longer to resolve than they should. This is not about effort or capability.

How quickly can you restore service when an incident hits your system? Most IT teams are not slowed down by detecting incidents. The challenge starts after something breaks, when the goal is to bring services back online as quickly as possible. Modern systems are highly distributed. Alerts arrive from multiple tools, dependencies are complex, and it is often difficult to immediately understand what actually failed.

Data will always be unclean. It's just a matter of degree. I internalized that on day one of my master's program in data science, when a professor warned us that roughly 80% of our time would go to preprocessing and cleaning, not building models. Years later, as Principal Product Manager for AI, ML and Analytics at Ivanti, I've found the guidance holds up remarkably well in practice.

Las Vegas, May 2026 — Almaden took part in the 2026 edition of HDI Service & Support World, held May 3–7 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. From Booth 109, the company had a clear mission: to show how Collective IQ, its Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platform, amplifies the value of IT service management without added complexity, disruption, or wasted time. Visitors to the booth had the opportunity to speak directly with experts, Dave Wagner and Bob Kruger (Chief Product Officer).

Have you tried using AI at work and felt it works well for small tasks, but not beyond that? It can handle simple things like creating a summary, writing a draft, or answering a question. This works because the task is clear. But most tasks are not that simple. They involve multiple steps. One step depends on another. Data comes from different systems, and some decisions need checks before moving ahead. This is where a single AI system starts to struggle.