BigPanda, a leading provider of agentic IT operations solutions, announced a strategic integration with Downdetector® by Ookla®, bringing real-time visibility into third-party outages directly into BigPanda AI Incident Assistant. The integration gives enterprise IT teams immediate, actionable insight into external service disruptions that can impact their applications and customers.
As enterprises become increasingly dependent on cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and internet services they don’t control, identifying the true cause of incidents has become harder-and slower. BigPanda’s external observability capability addresses this challenge by combining internal telemetry with internet-scale external signals, helping teams quickly determine whether an incident is caused by their own environment or by a third-party dependency. These include:
- Social media and user reports (via Downdetector)
- Third-party application status (SaaS, Cloud, ISPs)
- Environmental factors (Power outages, weather events, natural disasters)
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Harnessing Real-Time External Signals
Downdetector is the world’s most popular platform where people go to see if online services don’t work, providing transparent, real-time insight based on user reports and problem indicators from across the web. Through this integration, BigPanda brings those external signals directly into AI Incident Assistant, allowing enterprises with a Downdetector license to gain situational awareness of not only what’s happening within their infrastructure, but also across the internet. This allows incident responders to quickly pinpoint the true root cause of incidents. Other benefits include:
- Avoid painful bridge calls by quickly ruling out internal code or infrastructure issues.
- Reduce “Mean Time to Innocence” with immediate clarity that the incident is caused by factors outside your organization’s environment.
- Accelerate root cause analysis by identifying external factors immediately rather than at the end of a checklist.
- Communicate proactively to end users when the issue is caused by an external outage. This clarity allows them to involve only essential responders, eliminating unnecessary participants from bridge calls and keeping teams focused on high-value work.
Catching Gaps in Monitoring with External Observability
A global gaming publisher leveraged Downdetector to uncover external incidents that evaded their internal dashboards. In one instance, they identified a critical issue where DDoS protection blocked valid traffic and silenced their internal telemetry. This shows how external observability provides context when internal monitoring goes quiet.
“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.
SOURCE: BigPanda