The Guided Ops Era: Why Observability Needs a Compass

For years, “visibility” was the holy grail.
Teams instrumented everything (logs, traces, metrics), following the seemingly reasonable principle that if they collected and saw more, they’d definitely gain visibility and thus, control.

Somewhere along the way, companies started moving the goalpost further and further, hoping that the next iteration of integration and ingestion will bring them to visibility.
But with their growing tech landscape and the multiplication of dashboards, an exponentially growing alert stream formed...

Most companies never got to the promised land; they instead got overwhelmed by signals asking for their immediate attention and grabbed their entire bandwidth. Competing priorities became the name of the game, and they lost their direction.

Cybersecurity wrote the playbook (2021)

Exabeam (founded 2013) built an insight layer for Security Operations on top of companies’ existing log management and SIEM (Security Info/Event Management) systems.

Enterprise security teams often drown in low-level alerts from firewalls, ID systems, and other tools. Exabeam’s solution acts as a “co-pilot” that highlights important alerts only and guides analysts in their investigations.

By 2021 Exabeam had grown into one of the top independent SecOps platforms, raised $200 million, and reached a valuation of $2.4 billion.

Lesson: Under mountains of data, success lies in guiding human analysts to the needles in the haystack. This Guided Ops tool augments existing security tools with an intelligence layer, which has helped companies vastly improve their cyber defense while focusing operator effort where it matters most.

Process Engineering caught on (2022)

Celonis (founded 2011) created an intelligent process analysis layer atop companies’ existing IT platforms, and grew into a multi-billion-dollar independent leader. Celonis provides a process mining platform that plugs into widely-used systems like ERP, CRM, supply chain and other enterprise apps, then automatically maps out how processes are actually flowing, finds inefficiencies, and highlights the next best actions to improve.

By 2022 Celonis had 2,500+ deployments worldwide, including at giants like Johnson & Johnson, Dell, and Cisco, and secured a $1 billion funding round that valued the company at roughly $13 billion.

Lesson: Operational coaches are needed where data and workflows are obscured by siloed teams and data points.

Health sector proved B2C was also interested (2025)

Livongo proved that collecting & showing diabetic patients their glucose numbers wasn’t enough.
Their digital coach helped patients reduce their medical spending by 21.9 %, nearly $90 per member per month saved.

Omada Health followed the same model, then scaled it. They've helped patients unlock long-term health benefits and cost savings, and just IPO’d at a $1 billion valuation (June 2025). Studies validate the correlation between program engagement and clinical outcomes.

Lesson: metrics and dashboards don’t change outcomes, being engaged in a coached program does.

Other sectors were also witnessing the same shift

• E.g. from CSMs and CRM systems (2020): Gainsight layered actionable insight on top of CRM and product usage data to help teams proactively reduce churn. By guiding CSMs with next-best actions based on customer health scores, it drove a 32% churn reduction in just six months and scaled to over $100M ARR before being acquired for $1.1B.
• E.g. from HR systems (2021): Peakon turned employee feedback into coaching for managers by layering actionable insight for leadership on top of HR data. Its ability to surface what mattered most to teams and guide leadership on how to act led to a $700M acquisition by Workday in 2021.

The same shift is now hitting Observability

Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Grafana... These platforms already show us everything.
Yet teams everywhere still ask:

“Which issue should I fix first?” - Lack of prioritization
“How do I fix those issues?” - Lack of guidance
“What’s actually costing us the most?” - Lack of clarity on cost metrics
“How do I prove ROI on all this data?” - This is the new holy grail companies are after, at the junction of Observability Maturity and Observability Cost

Observability is catching up on The Guided Ops Era, the moment where systems have become too vast to fly solo.

In the Guided Ops Era, success isn’t about collecting more signals; it’s about having a compass that points to what matters.

Introducing Digitam: Your Compass for Datadog

Digitam is the first platform built for the Guided Ops Era.
It’s a Digital Technical Account Manager that:

• Analyzes your Datadog setup
• Prioritizes what truly matters through an Observability Maturity Model
• Guides you step-by-step to improve reliability and cut waste

In a world where observability costs are soaring and dashboards multiply faster than insight, Digitam helps you move from visibility to direction; from “What’s wrong?” to “Here’s what to do next.”

Why this matters now

The data proves it:
Guided Ops cut healthcare spend 22 % (B2C Healthcare), deliver 32% reduction in churn within 6 months (Customer Success), drive multi-billion-dollar outcomes in operations, and help security teams find the signal in the noise.

The lesson is universal: Even perfect visibility fails without a guided response.

The same evolution is coming for observability: only those who embrace guidance will deliver best-in-class reliability at a lower cost.

Value comes from direction, not data.
Welcome to the Guided Ops Era.
Welcome to Digitam.