Dec 18, 2024

Open-source tools like Grafana Labs and AI-driven AIOps are shaking up incident management, challenging PagerDuty and streamlining IT problem-solving and code fixes. Here's why it matters. Grafana Labs/ZDNET There are a handful of leading commercial toolmakers to help IT detect and respond to system outages and application failures, commonly referred to as "incident management and response," including companies such as PagerDuty, as well as various "observability" companies like Datadog and Dynatrace. However, the market is finally opening up to open-source software approaches, according to a report released last week by JP Morgan's software analysts. The open-source offerings, riding a wave of " AIOps " and other new industry approaches, have a serious shot at giving PagerDuty and the others a run for their money. The rise of open-source alternatives to PagerDuty "There has also been a lot of progress made in the open-source world," wrote JP Morgan software analyst Pinjalim Bora. Bora cites as examples the open-source startup Raintank of New York City, which does business as  Grafana Labs . The company has introduced "an on-call solution as an open-source project, which is free to use for self-managed and on-premise deployment." The company also sells cloud-based managed services that are not open-source. JP Morgan participated in a $240 million round of funding for Grafana in 2022. The company has raised a total of $840 million from venture capitalists, including Coatue Management and Lightspeed Management, according to FactSet. Bora notes that the rise of open source is just one component of an explosion in incident response tools vendors in recent years. The market has gone from around 70 such offerings in early 2022, both open and closed source, to a hundred or more now, "with the number of vendors serving the enterprise doubling in that time period from 15 to 30." AI is automating a lot of IT's problem-solving The AIOps category, which has  long been debated as a viable category by IBM and others , is getting a shot in the arm from generative AI investments. A report last month by venture capitalists at Menlo Ventures noted that IT operations currently make up the largest single category of enterprise spending on Gen AI, at 22%. Bora casts the matter of open and closed source in a brighter light: AI is going to automate a lot of problem-solving that is currently IT's job. The use of Gen AI-based coding assistants, such as Microsoft's GitHub Copilot , he believes, will change the cycle of code writing, checking, and remediation. "The increasing use of AI code assistants in building of applications likely will have some impacts in this space as well," wrote Bora. "While on one hand it will likely drive up workload growth, it could also lower mean-time-to-resolution. "For instance, we think as more machines write code, it could create patterns that are easier to find and remediate vs. human-written code, potentially reducing the number of critical P1 events [Priority 1, high-priority incidents for IT], and thus likely somewhat diluting the value proposition of a premium on-call scheduling tool." Open Source