Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As enterprise ITOps teams monitor increasingly complex, cloud-based, containerized systems, traditional observability practices are struggling to keep up. As IT infrastructure complexity increases, the typical response is to layer on more monitoring, logging, and instrumentation.

Enterprise Management Associates found that major IT service outages are increasing in cost, frequency, and duration, with unplanned downtime costing large enterprises nearly $25,000 per minute, or $1.5 million per hour. When every minute costs $25,000, you can’t afford to waste engineering time on coordination tasks like creating channels, paging experts, typing summaries, and posting updates. An agentic AI-powered incident assistant can eliminate that waste and reduce bridge call costs.

Every enterprise depends on continuous changes to its IT environment. New code releases, infrastructure updates, configuration changes, and security patches are all crucial to support continuous innovation. These same changes are also a leading source of operational risk and one of the most common causes of failures at the network, infrastructure, and software layers, resulting in outages.

Enterprise ITOps leaders are realizing that legacy incident management processes are collapsing under the weight of today’s sprawling, hybrid-cloud enterprise environments. The fastest path from reactive firefighting to proactive, automated control is an agentic AI-powered incident assistant that can understand context, coordinate people, and take intelligent action at machine speed. Enterprise IT doesn’t look anything like it did even five years ago.

When something breaks in a modern digital service, customers feel it instantly. Pages stall, requests time out, and carts are abandoned, while frustration grows long before a root cause is identified. What the world never sees is the engineering effort required to keep these systems healthy in the first place. Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) carry that responsibility every day.

The recent Cloudflare outage served as a stark reminder of how fragile the global digital ecosystem can be due to a single point of failure. In a matter of minutes, thousands of websites that rely on Cloudflare’s CDN, from Fortune 500 brands to SaaS platforms and consumer apps, went offline for hours. The business impacts were severe, with Shopify alone suffering over $4 million in losses while downstream merchant impacts potentially exceeded $170 million.