Why Modern Incident Response Strategies Need Network and Service Intelligence: Part 1

IT and network teams are under growing pressure to detect and resolve incidents faster than ever before. As businesses rely on complex, distributed architectures, spanning cloud services, SaaS and AI-enabled applications, and external networks - disconnected incident response strategies often fall short. The challenge? Too many alerts, too little context, and no clear visibility into external dependencies.

A modern approach to incident response must combine AI-driven analytics and event management with network insights connected to business context to ensure seamless digital experiences. Instead of relying on loosely integrated responses, organizations need to harness bi-directional views, automation and predictive insights to proactively detect, prioritize, and remediate tomorrow’s problems. 

Traditional Incident Response Has Seen Better Days

In today’s digital environments, IT teams are flooded with thousands of alerts daily, many of which are redundant, unactionable, or false positives. Without a more efficient way to correlate and filter alerts, teams will continue struggling to differentiate between critical incidents and background noise. This overload of alerts leads to delayed response times, burnout, and missed issues. To overcome this, teams with the fastest response times have prioritized adopting AI-driven event correlation as part of their incident response to automatically group related alerts into meaningful incidents. Without, teams remain stuck reacting to noise instead of acting on the most impactful issues first. 

When an issue arises, teams still default to diving into logs, dashboard hopping, and manual ticketing. But in hybrid environments, problems don’t stay in one place - they bounce across app tiers, infrastructure, and external networks, making root cause analysis complex and time-consuming. You need a strategy that connects the dots automatically, because minutes actually matter. Instead of a reactive approach, the fastest teams among us are already leveraging intelligent event correlation to reduce noise, determine differences between signals, and automate remediation before end users are impacted. 

Organizations increasingly rely on SaaS applications, cloud-hosted workloads, and third-party APIs to stay competitive, leaving many IT teams lacking the visibility needed to monitor third-party networks. When a performance issue arises, they are often left in the dark, unsure whether root cause is an internal failure or an issue with an ISP, cloud provider, or a SaaS vendor. Without visibility or proof, you can’t act confidently - or hold vendors accountable. 

Bridging network intelligence and observability, organizations can expand visibility into both owned and unowned networks, ensuring that they can detect, diagnose, and respond to third-party service degradations as effectively as internal disruptions.

Why Observability Providers Struggle with Network Visibility

Many observability platforms have attempted to incorporate some form of network monitoring capabilities, but most fall short in delivering the deep, real-time insights required to truly understand and act on external network dependencies:

They focus on what they own - logs, infra, apps - not what they don’t, like the open internet & ISPs.

• Observability platforms traditionally focus on logs, apps, and infrastructure, leaving external network performance largely unexplored. While some solutions claim to provide network insights, their visibility is often restricted to owned environments, meaning they lack end-to-end visibility across the internet, ISPs, and cloud providers.

They lack deep network telemetry - no BGP analysis, no routing visibility, no global vantage points.

• Many monitoring platforms attempt to correlate infrastructure and application performance with network events, but their capabilities lack the depth needed for effective troubleshooting. Without the granular telemetry on internet routing, BGP changes, and ISP performance, ITOps teams can often remain uncertain about the cause of many service degradations.

They’re reactive - you still only find out there’s a problem after your users complain.

• Most observability solutions still function reactively, alerting teams only after an issue has impacted users. Advanced network assurance solutions, on the other hand, offer predictive insights, allowing organizations to anticipate network slowdowns, ISP outages, and internet congestion before they impact revenue generating services.

By combining intelligent event management, deep observability, and dedicated network intelligence, organizations can finally achieve the full-service visibility required to improve resilience and ensure seamless digital experiences.

What's Next?

Read on with Part 2.