Correlation tells you forty alerts are one incident. It doesn't tell you why.
Alert correlation is not root cause analysis. BigPanda, Moogsoft and incumbent correlation tools cluster symptoms into one incident; they do not tell you which change caused it, who owns the failing service, or what to write in the RCA. Keep them, Onepane runs on top of them, inside your VPC, and delivers the finished, evidence-linked RCA under SLA.
What does correlation do, and what does a managed root-cause service add?
| Dimension | Legacy AIOps correlation | Onepane, managed RCA |
|---|---|---|
| What it answers | Which alerts belong to the same incident. | Which change caused it, how it propagated, who owns the failing service, and what to write in the RCA. |
| Input | Alert and event streams from your monitoring tools. | Telemetry, change history (deploys, config, IaC, cloud events), topology and ownership, ITSM, read-only, in your VPC. |
| Output | A correlated incident with a reduced alert count, routed to a team. | An evidence-linked Root Cause Report, Customer-Facing RCA, Evidence Pack, Change Attribution Record and Problem Record, inside an SLA. |
| Causation | Statistical or rule-based grouping of symptoms; no causal model. | Causal chain stated as trigger → propagation → failure, with contributing factors held distinct. |
| Change attribution | Sometimes surfaces a change event as one more alert. | Deployment, config, IaC or cloud-provider change linked through topology to the symptom, with the diff and approver. |
| Ownership | Routes to a team from a rule table you maintain. | Service-and-ownership map built from what is running; snapshot captured at the moment of the incident. |
| Who runs it | You. It is a platform you staff, tune and maintain. | Onepane. Agents investigate, our engineers sign off, the RCA arrives. You do not staff a platform. |
| When it is wrong | A mis-grouped incident; nobody is accountable. | Abstention is a first-class output; the SLA and credits make us accountable. |
| Deployment | Typically SaaS; some on-prem legacy deployments. | Customer VPC. Telemetry stays in your account. |
The two columns are not alternatives. The left one is already deployed and paid for; the right one consumes its output.
Why did AIOps projects fail to deliver root cause?
Not because the vendors were bad at correlation. They were good at it. The projects were sold as something else.
It clustered alerts instead of explaining causation
Correlation collapses forty alerts into one incident. That is genuinely useful during the storm. It says nothing about which change caused the incident, and nothing about how it propagated. The engineer still has to investigate.
It handed you a platform you then had to staff
Rules, models and topology feeds needed tuning that never ended. The people meant to be freed up became the people running the AIOps tool. The headcount moved sideways instead of down.
It had no answer to 'who owns this'
In a ten-thousand-resource estate with a stale CMDB, ownership is the bottleneck. Correlation routes on a rule table; nobody maintains the rule table; the incident goes to the wrong team.
It never produced the document
The RCA the customer or the review board was waiting on still got written by hand, from Slack, after hours. The deliverable that justified the budget was never in scope.
"We already tried AIOps and it didn't work." Good, that helps.
Most of those projects failed for the same two reasons: they clustered alerts instead of explaining causation, and they handed you a platform you then had to staff. We are not selling you a platform to run. We are selling the finished output, with an SLA, and we abstain when the evidence isn't there rather than guessing.
So the useful question is: what specifically did it get wrong? Mis-grouped incidents, wrong team, missed the change, never produced the write-up. That answer is our accuracy spec, and it becomes the scoring criteria for the replay on your own historical incidents.
The pain is proven, the budget line exists, and someone else already made the internal case for change. Read what change-aware root cause analysis adds.
How does Onepane run on top of correlation?
- 01Your correlation tool keeps doing what it does during the incident: collapsing noise and routing. We do not touch that.
- 02When the Sev1 closes, investigation starts automatically inside your VPC. Agents pull the correlated incident, change history, telemetry and the service-and-ownership map, and state the causal chain.
- 03Our engineers sign off. If the evidence does not support a confident conclusion, the Abstention Statement says so.
- 04The Root Cause Report, Change Attribution Record and Problem Record land in your ITSM inside the SLA window. Full set at /artifacts.
Onepane vs AIOps, the questions.
What is the difference between alert correlation and root cause analysis?
Alert correlation groups related alerts and events into a single incident so the team sees one problem instead of forty. Root cause analysis explains why the incident happened: which change or condition triggered it, how it propagated through the topology, which service failed and who owns it, and what prevents recurrence, as a document with evidence. Correlation is an input to RCA; it is not RCA.
Why did so many AIOps projects fail to deliver root cause?
Two reasons recur. They clustered symptoms rather than modelling causation, so engineers still had to investigate; and they were platforms the buyer had to staff, tune and maintain, so the promised headcount reduction became a headcount move. A third, quieter reason: none produced the RCA document, which is what the customer, the auditor and the review board were actually waiting on.
Should we replace BigPanda or Moogsoft to use Onepane?
No. Keep them. Correlation is useful during the incident and it is already deployed and paid for. Onepane runs on top of it: when the Sev1 closes, we take the correlated incident, the change history and the telemetry, investigate inside your VPC, and deliver the RCA. Nothing to rip out.
We already tried AIOps and it didn't work, why would this be different?
Because you are not buying a platform to run; you are buying the finished output with an SLA, and we abstain when the evidence isn't there rather than guessing. Tell us specifically what the last project got wrong, that becomes the scoring criteria for the replay on your own historical incidents. A failed AIOps project is proven pain and an existing budget line, not a reason to stop.
Is Onepane an AIOps tool?
No. Onepane is a managed root-cause service. Legacy AIOps correlation tools are software you deploy and operate to reduce alert noise. Onepane is a service that runs on top of the observability and correlation you already own, in your VPC, and delivers the RCA document under SLA.
Tell us what the last project got wrong.We'll score the replay against it.
Send us your last 90 days of Sev1 tickets. We show what we would have found, how fast, and the document you would have received. Two weeks, no cost.