The 10 Best BigPanda Alternatives in 2024

Who doesn’t love a cute and cuddly panda? Those black and white bamboo eating machines are just too adorable to not want to squeeze!

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about BigPanda, the incident management solution designed to help IT teams manage the complex modern production environment.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a powerful tool. But the sheer fact that you’re here now, reading this means that there are people out there looking for BigPanda alternatives.

For one reason or another, BigPanda just isn’t hitting the mark for users, leading them to turn to competitors. Odds are that you’re in that same boat. If so, don’t panic. We’ve compiled a list of 10 of the best BigPanda alternatives in 2024 for your convenience. Let’s start with what BigPanda has to offer.

BigPanda Features

BigPanda is an intelligence and automation platform. It’s primarily known for its incident management and alerting capabilities, but it also offers a few other features:

• Alert Intelligence
• Incident intelligence
• Workflow automation
• Unified analytics

It is a simple tool in terms of features, but it still gets the job done for certain DevOps and SREs as far as improving service availability goes.

BigPanda Pricing

In the SaaS industry, pricing means everything. It’s a massive determining factor for decision-makers ready to pull the trigger. Unfortunately, BigPanda doesn’t publicly disclose any pricing information online.

This approach isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it counts as a con towards a tool. It lacks transparency and gives potential buyers the feeling that BigPanda (and other tools that hide their pricing) is trying to trick them.

Take from that what you will, but unfortunately, nobody can display BigPanda prices.

The Top 10 BigPanda Alternatives in 2024

1. Better Stack

Uptime by Better Stack allows you to plug in your infrastructure monitoring services and get alerted when crucial events take place.

Better Stack offers seamless log analysis, effortlessly scanning through petabytes of logs within moments and promptly raising alarms upon detecting anomalies, presence, or absence. With multiple integrations across various DevOps tools, Better Stack delivers a dependable incident management tool.

Some features include incident timelines, multichannel alerting, merging, website monitoring, and post-mortems, error logs, and historical reporting. There are plenty of customization options to make your experience even more fluid, like notifications and prioritization options.

With Better Stack, you get all the debugging data you and your team need to dig deep and fix the root cause of the incident. Take it a step further and create an on-call schedule to ensure that the right person is getting alerted at the right time, and nobody gets burnt out with alert fatigue.

What’s more, the platform's automated multi-location checks thoroughly to assess and verify incidents before issuing alerts, effectively eliminating false positives. Upon confirmation, the system promptly notifies the appropriate agent via push notifications or various communication channels such as SMS, email, or integrated tools.

🌟Key features

• Incident management
• Synthetic monitoring
• Log management
• Uptime monitoring
• Comprehensive observability dashboards
• API monitoring

➕Pros

• Built-in Status Pages
• 30-second check frequency
• On-call scheduling
• Dozens of integrations

➖Cons

• Not a full-stack observability solution
• Not yet as feature-rich as some of the larger, more expensive platforms

💲Pricing

Better Stack Uptime offers a basic monitoring package at no cost. Similarly, Better Stack Logs provides a free plan with up to 1GB of data per month.

For those seeking additional features, Uptime premium packages begin at only $25 per month and include 50 monitors, 5 status pages, and integrated incident management.

Likewise, Logs premium packages start at just $25 per month, offering a 30GB allowance and 15 days of retention.

Want more details? Check out our pricing page.

2. PagerDuty

PagerDuty is a cloud-based incident management platform that has become quite popular with DevOps teams. Users can navigate incidents through an enterprise-level incident management platform, developing resilience over time.

PagerDuty is a unified platform for incident management, allowing users to get alerted throughout the entire incident lifecycle, but reduce alert noise and accelerate incident triage, turn tedious and repetitive tasks into routine automation, and share critical information with stakeholders.

Not a big fan of PagerDuty? Check out some similar tools to PagerDuty.

🌟Key features

• Incident management

➕Pros

• Incident lifecycle management
• Runbook automation
• Comprehensive status pages

➖Cons

• Expensive, per-user pricing
• User reviews report an overwhelming UI
• User reviews indicate difficulties with reporting

💲Pricing

For incident management, PagerDuty offers 4 different pricing tiers. First, there’s a free, limited version of the tool that’s good for up to 5 users.

Next, the Professional plan starts at $21 per user per month. This plan offers unlimited API calls and SMS alerts.

After that, the Business plan starts at $41 per user per month. This plan offers everything that the previous two do, but includes automation workflows for incidents and business.

Finally, the Enterprise plan offers completely customizable features, limitations, and users. This is the plan you’ll be looking for if you’re a massive enterprise that needs all of the incident-related features in one platform. Unfortunately, there are no prices for this tier listed online.

3. Moogsoft

Moogsoft is an AIOps platform that's been around since 2011 and was acquired by Dell in August 2023. It has a bunch of features for handling IT operations. It can integrate with numerous monitoring tools and uses machine learning to spot and deal with issues before they become big problems.

It's a decent substitute for BigPanda in terms of spotting and fixing incidents early. But, there have been some folks mentioning that it can get a bit shaky at times and lacks some options for customization. Still, if you're after an all-around AIOps solution, Moogsoft could fit the bill.

🌟Key features

• Incident management

➕Pros

• Easy alert correlation
• Multi-platform ingestion
• Easy-to-use platform

➖Cons

• Very few recent reviews of Moogsoft online
• User reviews report complications with the machine-learning aspects
• User reviews report issues with dashboards and reporting

💲Pricing

Like BigPanada, Moogsoft does not publicly display its pricing. If you’re curious, you’ll unfortunately have to reach out to their sales team for a quote.

4. Squadcast

Squadcast is a solid alternative to BigPanda, bundling essential components like On-Call, Incident Response, and Reliability Workflows into one platform.

The on-call management comes with customizable schedules, escalation policies, and intelligent alert routing through multiple notification channels. This is further enhanced with incident response features via integrated communication channels, supportive Runbooks, Custom APIs, and Webhooks.

Squadcast also implements workflows to automate incident tasks and their resolutions. Top it off with advanced reliability metrics, SLO tracking, and built-in public and private status pages, and Squadcast makes for an excellent BigPanda alternative.

🌟Key features

• Incident management
• Service reliability management

➕Pros

• Easy to integrate with open-source tools like Zabbix and Prometheus
• Automatic escalation
• Lots of customization options

➖Cons

• Kind of pricey for incident management alone
• User reviews report a steep learning curve for newcomers

💲Pricing

Squadcast has 4 pricing tiers, the first one being free. With the free tier, you’re limited to 5 users max and only 100 alerts.

The next tier is Pro, and it starts at $9 per user per month. With this package, you’re not limited by users, so long as you pay for them, and each user has up to 100 alert notifications with the possibility to add more for $0.10 each.

Next, there’s the Premium plan at $16 per user per month. This tier gives you the option to bring on stakeholders and delay notifications. This is also the first tier that offers unlimited alert notifications.

Finally, there’s the Enterprise plan at $21 per user per month. This package basically gives you unlimited alerts and stakeholders and gives you a few more features over the PRemium plan like global event rules.

5. xMatters

xMatters is another incident management exclusive platform that offers a decent set of features. Quick disclaimer: It is by no means as advanced as some of the other tools on this list, but it does provide a solid foundation if you’re looking for a decent incident management tool.

It comes with all the essentials: alert management, on-call, escalations, and basic communication. What xMatters is very good at is being reliable. It’s not nearly as complex as some of the full-stack solutions out there, which is what attracts a lot of people to it.

🌟Key features

• Incident management
• Workflow automation

➕Pros

• Very simple and reliable

➖Cons

• Not very feature-rich
• User reviews report that only one alert can be closed at a time, making it very time-consuming
• User reviews report complexities in setting up automation tasks

💲Pricing

xMatters provides a range of pricing options tailored to accommodate businesses of various sizes. Their entry-level plan is free, catering to smaller organizations. For more advanced features, paid plans begin at $9 per user per month, with another tier offering additional Incident Management functions at $39 per user per month. However, pricing for large-scale deployments may not be transparent and may require further inquiry.

6. LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is a well-known infrastructure monitoring solution that also happens to have incident management built right in. They pride themselves on delivering the complexity of industry giants without the headache of intricate configurations.

With LM Envision, LogicMonitor's SaaS-based monitoring platform, you can effortlessly monitor server health, performance, and utilization. This lightweight, agentless system automatically detects, monitors, and alerts on critical metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk usage.

Moreover, LogicMonitor provides extensive visibility into SQL infrastructure, offering valuable insights for best practice alerts and thresholds. This enables you to identify sluggish SQL queries, overloaded resources, and database events with precision.

🌟Key features

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Incident management
• Cloud monitoring
• Digital experience monitoring

➕Pros

• Lightweight and easy to use
• Agentless monitoring available
• Easy to customize modules
• Granular data and metrics

➖Cons

• Expensive, per-resource monitoring
• User reviews report occasional errors in SNMP connectivity
• User reviews report difficulties setting up alerts

💲Pricing

LogicMonitor hasn’t always publicly displayed its pricing information, and perhaps it was intentional. It offers a lot in terms of observability, but it is quite expensive.

We won’t go through all the prices here, but we will specifically mention infrastructure monitoring, as it includes incident management.

Infrastructure monitoring from LogicMonitor starts at $22 per resource per month. This means that if your stack includes multiple data sources, you’ll be paying a pretty penny.

7. FireHydrant

FireHydrant is a relatively new incident response and alerting platform. It was created back in 2016 to automate and streamline the entire incident management process.

It integrates very well with various tools and even has step-by-step guidance via Slack. With FireHydrant, it’s easy to collaborate and provide actionable insight for improving reliability.

FireHydrant is fairly customizable and offers audit trails, communications management, IT incident management, and task management to fast-growing engineering teams.

🌟Key features

• Incident management

➕Pros

• Easy to use
• Highly customizable
• Straightforward implementation

➖Cons

• Expensive, per year pricing
• User reviews report constraints with alert trigger customization
• User reviews report needed improvements to analytics

💲Pricing

For incident management, FireHydrant only offers 1 plan outside of the custom, enterprise plan. The incident management pro plan is $6,000 per year, and there’s no option to pay monthly.

8. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a top-tier monitoring tool, renowned for its many capabilities, including automated incident management. It excels at improving response times and data accuracy for reporting and analysis, and it’s fairly easy to customize alerts and integrate with ITSM solutions.

With Dynatrace's advanced observability spanning PaaS and container technologies like AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, or Cloud Foundry, you gain access to critical insights such as process detection, resource utilization, network performance, and log monitoring. Additionally, it allows you to hold partners accountable and verify SLAs through third-party data and event monitoring integration.

One of Dynatrace's notable features is its quick start-up time, enabling users to begin monitoring server metrics within five minutes of signing up. It provides immediate visibility into server CPU, network, and memory health, even down to the processing level.

However, it's essential to acknowledge that Dynatrace's robust functionality comes with a learning curve and may require time to fully comprehend and utilize it effectively.

Not a big fan of Dynatrace? Check out some similar tools to Dynatrace.

🌟Key features

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Incident management
• Application security
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring

➕Pros

• Full-stack monitoring
• Easy to set up
• Feature-rich
• AI-powered

➖Cons

• Very expensive, especially at scale
• User reviews report issues with debugging
• User reviews report occasional false signals with alerts

💲Pricing

There's no denying it—Dynatrace can break the bank. Because it’s considered an enterprise solution, it comes with a ton of features and products. These fancy features bring with them an equally as fancy price tag.

For instance, their Infrastructure monitoring starts at $0.04 per hour for each host, which may seem modest at first, but it can rack up quickly. At $0.04 per hour for 24 hours a day and 30 days a month, each host racks up to a substantial $28.80 monthly.

9. Sematext

Sematext offers incident management capabilities as part of its broader observability platform. Its incident management features allow users to detect, prioritize, and respond to incidents effectively within their IT infrastructure.

The platform provides tools for alerting and notification, allowing users to define thresholds and conditions for triggering alerts based on metrics, logs, or events. When incidents occur, Sematext helps teams collaborate and coordinate their response efforts, ensuring timely resolution.

Sematext also offers incident timelines, merging, and post-mortem functionalities to facilitate incident analysis and learning from past incidents. Additionally, error logs and historical reporting features provide valuable insights into incident root causes and trends over time.

🌟Key features

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Incident management
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Log management and analytics

➕Pros

• 100+ integrations
• Integration specific dashboards
• Automated discovery and Sematext Agent

➖Cons

• Log monitoring can be expensive
• Configuring dashboards can be overwhelming
• User reviews report apps getting deleted

💲Pricing

Sematext offers a range of pricing packages for infrastructure monitoring, catering to various needs and budgets.

At the entry-level, there's a free option suitable for small setups, allowing monitoring of up to 5 hosts with a retention period of 30 minutes. However, it comes with limitations, including only 1 alert rule and a maximum of 3 containers per host.

Moving up, the Standard plans start at $3.60 per host, providing 7 days of retention. The price increases to $4.32 for 15 days and $5.04 for 30 days, with unlimited alert rules and up to 5 containers per host.

For more advanced requirements, the Pro plan starts at $5.76 per month, offering 7 days of retention. This plan provides additional retention period options, with the highest being 365 days at $10.80 per host. It also includes unlimited alert rules and up to 8 containers per host.

10. AppDynamics

AppDynamics offers incident management and monitoring as part of its holistic monitoring solution, ensuring that Infrastructure monitoring is included regardless of the chosen plan.

The platform seamlessly integrates ITSM and ITIL solutions with full-stack performance monitoring, enabling users to synchronize their workflows effectively. It facilitates rapid identification of root causes and preemptive issue resolution to prevent disruptions to business outcomes. By automatically triaging incidents to the relevant teams, the platform streamlines the incident response process, ensuring swift resolution and minimal impact on business operations.

AppDynamics leverages anomaly detection and machine learning algorithms to establish baselines and alert users when servers deviate from the norm. Essential metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk usage are presented in a clean dashboard format, offering a clear hierarchical overview of their performance.

🌟Key features

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Incident management
• Application monitoring
• Database monitoring

➕Pros

• Clean UI
• Code-level profiling
• Actionable dashboards and reports

➖Cons

• Expensive
• User reviews report occasional improper log parsing
• User reviews report needing a third-party tool for monitoring instances

💲Pricing

AppDynamics offers transparent and easy-to-understand pricing, albeit at a higher cost. Pricing is determined based on the number of CPU cores utilized for monitoring purposes. Here's an overview of each plan and its corresponding cost per CPU core:

• Infrastructure Monitoring Edition - $6 per CPU core: Includes infrastructure monitoring exclusively.
• Premium Edition - $33 per CPU core: Encompasses infrastructure, application performance, and database monitoring.
• Enterprise Edition - $50 per CPU core: Builds upon the Premium Edition by adding business performance monitoring capabilities.
• Enterprise Edition for SAP - $95 per CPU core: Includes infrastructure monitoring, business performance monitoring, and specialized SAP monitoring features.

The 10 Best BigPanda Alternatives Comparison

Conclusion

These are the top 10 best BigPanda alternatives on the market in 2024. Keep in mind, however, that they are not the only ones out there. Although they don’t have built-in incident management, some people utilize open-source tools like Zabbix or Nagios to help receive alerts and notifications when an incident arises.

Make sure to do your research, test all these tools, and take all the time you need to find the right BigPanda alternative for you.

Article by

Zach McDaniel

With his laptop as a sword and coffee machine as a shield, Zach is a content strategist here at Better Stack. When he's not wordsmithing, he's putting together PCs, working on cars, or scheming about how to own a zoo one day.

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