How to Avoid Traffic Jams – On the Road and In IT Ops

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The summer travel season typically peaks at Labor Day, with heavily congested roadways, seemingly endless traffic jams, and even crowded parking lots!

Fortunately, car companies, traffic websites, news organizations and governments can rely on INRIX, the global leader in connected car services and intelligent movement, to deliver driving insights from the cloud. INRIX eases the world’s traffic headaches by keeping users updated and informed of the latest road conditions, providing Labor Day – and year-round – insights from the most robust driver network in the world, collecting data 24/7 from 40+ countries and 275 million vehicles, smartphones, cameras, incidents and other sensors.

How does INRIX do it? Driving insights are being delivered, for Labor Day and every day, with far fewer headaches at INRIX as a result of better IT operations.

Data-driven insights for drivers

As the world’s leading authority on traffic and mobility data, INRIX has gathered some fascinating statistics about life on America’s streets and highways, including:

  • The United States has the worst traffic congestion, with the average commuter having spent nearly 50 hours in traffic in 2015.
  • Los Angeles ranks as the worst American city for traffic jams, with drivers spending an average of 81 hours in traffic each year.
  • Following Los Angeles, the next worst cities for U.S. traffic are Washington, D.C. (75 hours/year), the San Francisco Bay Area (75 hours/year), Houston (74 hours/year), New York (73 hours/year), Seattle (66 hours/year), Boston (64 hours/year), Chicago (60 hours/year), Atlanta (59 hours/year) and Honolulu (49 hours/year).

Managing the data deluge while minimizing stress

Because INRIX operates such a vast data collection network, their IT team is called upon to manage a truly daunting amount of data, both for internal use and external customers. As a result of this high volume, INRIX’s IT teams were faced with an average of 500-1,000 service alerts per day and some 15,000 alerts per month. Because each alert required review, sorting, organization, triage, response and resolution, the team was drowning in service requests and needed a smarter way to manage, in particular during peak periods like Labor Day.

To silence “noisy” alerts and reduce overall service disruptions, as well as to achieve better IT ops management, INRIX selected BigPanda’s scalable Alert Correlation Platform. Leveraging BigPanda’s diverse set of monitoring tools to optimize performance, INRIX can now better understand IT ops problems and bring them to a quicker resolution.

The Alert Correlation Platform uses data science to transform IT data and alerts into consolidated, actionable insights for INRIX by clustering and correlating incident reports, contextualizing and providing background for each incident, and leveraging automated sharing rules for improved collaboration. By silencing “noise,” optimizing performance and reducing service disruptions, INRIX has seen an immediate 60-90 percent reduction in the alerts it needs to review each day.

What BigPanda means for INRIX is a greater state of readiness for “traffic jams” in IT ops and better quality of life for IT managers and analysts. Consolidated alerts mean more streamlined management of IT issues and less running around, while BigPanda analytics drive greater intelligence, visibility and productivity. This frees up the INRIX team to focus on delivering world-class traffic information and helping guide customers through today’s traffic maze.

And the team can now handle more efficiently and effectively those big spikes in service alerts, whether it is Labor Day or just another Monday morning in Los Angeles.

Dan TurchinContributed by: Dan Turchin, BigPanda‘s VP of Growth Strategy. He’s passionate about building great teams that build great products that solve hard problems that change lives. Turchin was formerly Chief Product Officer at AccelOps (Fortinet), a Senior Director of Product Strategy at ServiceNow, and the co-founder and CEO of Aeroprise (BMC Software). He’s a big fan of Orwell, Dr. Seuss, youth soccer, adventure sports, and Tynker.

 

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