BigPanda, a recognized leader in agentic IT operations solutions, unveiled a major enhancement to its AI Incident Assistant platform through an integration with Downdetector® by Ookla®. This strategic partnership brings real-time outage data from third-party services directly into BigPanda’s external observability capabilities, enabling enterprise IT teams to more rapidly detect and resolve issues that originate outside their own infrastructure.
As organizations increasingly rely on distributed cloud environments, SaaS tools, and externally hosted services, root-cause identification for incidents has grown more complex. BigPanda’s external observability capability was designed to bridge this gap by fusing internal performance telemetry with large-scale external signals.
These signals include:
- Real-time social media and user outage reports provided by Downdetector
- Live status information on cloud and SaaS dependencies
- Environmental data covering power disruptions, weather events, and other external threats
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Real-Time Insights Into Third-Party Service Disruptions
Downdetector is the top platform for people and businesses to check if online services are down. It offers clear outage indicators based on user reports from all over the internet. Now, enterprises with a Downdetector license can view external outage signals. They can see these signals alongside internal telemetry in BigPanda’s AI Incident Assistant. This unified view helps incident response teams quickly determine if a service disruption is due to internal systems or external factors.
The integration offers several operational advantages:
- Avoid unnecessary incident escalations by quickly ruling out internal infrastructure faults.
- Reduce “Mean Time to Innocence” with faster confirmation that an outage originates outside the organization’s environment.
- Accelerate root-cause analysis by surfacing external contributors early in the troubleshooting process.
- Enhance communication with stakeholders by proactively informing end users when an incident is linked to third-party service outages.
Bridging Monitoring Gaps with External Signals
External observability adds an essential layer of context for incidents that traditional internal monitoring can miss. For example, a leading global gaming publisher discovered an outage where its internal dashboards showed normal operations despite service disruptions. The issue was later traced to a DDoS protection layer that blocked valid traffic, suppressing internal telemetry. Only by incorporating Downdetector’s external signals was the true outage identified.
“With BigPanda and Downdetector, we caught a major incident where a DDoS protection layer was blocking valid traffic and preventing our own telemetry from being sent. Our internal dashboards showed green, but the external signals triggered an immediate investigation. That kind of ‘outside-in’ visibility is the only way to detect failures that silence your own monitoring tools.” Engineering Leader, Major Global Gaming Studio.
