Utility Achieves Proactive Monitoring Across Critical Services

Challenge 

Proactively monitoring IT and OT environments remains a persistent challenge for utilities. Tool sprawl, siloed ownership and manual processes often keep teams stuck firefighting issues instead of preventing them. At best, this delays incident response. At worst, it prolongs outages of critical services.  

This was the situation facing one midsized U.S. electric utility.  

Over the years, teams across infrastructure, applications and operations had adopted their own monitoring tools. As a result, IT staff spent an inordinate amount of time chasing noisy and incomplete alerts, tracking disparate dashboards, and interpreting inconsistent analytics reports.  

When a critical issue occurred, IT leadership often had to pull in many members of different teams into large-scale war room calls. Staff would scramble to identify the root cause of an incident and the extent to which systems were impacted.  

This reactive posture eventually took a toll on the business. The utility's website was subject to downtime, disrupting bill payments, power map updates and service restoration notices during severe weather. In its OT environments, network issues in power plants could linger for days and edge devices could fail without triggering immediate alerts. 

To better monitor critical services spanning IT and OT systems, IT leadership set its sights on creating a common operating picture that would give every stakeholder access to the same validated data in real time.  

They just needed a partner with the technical and industry experience to help them execute their vision.   

Solution 

Over two and a half years, WWT partnered with the utility through six strategic phases — from early strategy and architecture development to automation and training. Throughout the process, we kept IT leadership's goal of a common operating picture front and center.   

The journey to proactive monitoring

Phase 1: Discovery and strategy 

We began by building a clear understanding of the utility's monitoring environment and aligning on the future state of a common operating picture. Through stakeholder interviews and journey mapping, we documented the roles, workflows, motivations and incident pain points of key personas connected to the monitoring center. These included Tier 1 operators, OT staff and business stakeholders.  

During this work, we discovered significant tool sprawl. In many cases, monitoring tools were duplicative and underused, with IT struggling to maintain those nearing end of support. At the same time, the existing toolset lacked key capabilities.

It also became clear where critical data was siloed and how operating without a single source of truth slowed incident resolution. These insights would drive the program's next phases. 

Phase 2: Architecture and tooling 

With current-state findings in hand, we designed a modular architectural framework that defined how tools in the monitoring environment would be used — from data ingestion and rule processing to visualization.  

The framework allows for tools to be replaced or added without costly rework, prevents the utility from becoming locked into a single vendor's stack, and supports automation scripts that take on repetitive resolution tasks.  

To make sure the architecture could evolve with future needs, we mapped how data would flow through the ecosystem. This set the stage for Phase 3, when the utility would begin expanding and integrating data sources. 

Phase 3: Data integration and visualization 

With new tooling, the utility scaled from 20 monitored data sources to more than 50, with over 120 data pipelines feeding a centralized data lake.  

These pipelines allowed staff to create specific rules and filters to merge data into an organized structure, laying the foundation for a true common operating picture.  

To bring that picture to life, we designed dashboards for key stakeholder groups: 

• Tier 1 operators gained access to dashboards that provided real-time triage views to speed incident response. 
• IT leaders gained access to dashboards that summarized system health and presented high-level status overviews. 
• Business stakeholders gained access to dashboards that tracked metrics tied to customer-facing services. 

Phase 4: Network optimization 

With the data foundation in place, the focus shifted to the network itself — an area that had long suffered from inconsistent tooling and blind spots. We consolidated network monitoring into tailored dashboards covering edge devices, core infrastructure and power plant connectivity.  

These views gave network teams and field personnel the context they needed to pinpoint issues, replacing fragmented alerts with a clearer picture of root causes. 

Proactive alerting tied to these dashboards meant staff could identify emerging issues earlier and address them before service degradation occurred. Instead of firefighting, network operations became a more predictive, strategic practice. 

Phase 5: Enhancement and correlation tuning 

After net-new development was finished, the team fine-tuned correlation logic within its incident correlation platform. Field input added real-world knowledge to alert logic, making the platform's recommendations more accurate.

In addition, proofs of concept related to in-memory storage, log analytics and data governance further expanded monitoring capabilities.  

Phase 6: Training and transition 

We conducted formal training sessions to upskill Tier 1 operators on how to use automation scripts to act on incidents directly rather than escalating issues to IT. This shift significantly reduced internal handoffs and support fatigue.  

Finally, we completed a proof of concept that laid the groundwork for an ongoing cloud migration effort.  

Results 

By the numbers 

Key applications and systems 

The utility's unified monitoring now spans dozens of business-critical systems, including its: 

• Main website, where customers pay bills, check the status of power outages and receive severe weather updates.
• Customer care platforms, which handle tasks like processing service requests, managing billing inquiries and sending payment alerts.
• Advanced distribution management system (ADMS), a real-time platform for grid operations.
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which support efficient scheduling and coordination of back-office and field operations.

Enterprise-wide impact  

The utility now operates with a common operating picture that enables proactive operations, faster recovery times and significantly lower incident costs.  

Its incident correlation platform cuts alert noise by 85 percent, allowing staff to focus on the alerts that truly matter. When a P1 incident occurs, the right team is engaged immediately, eliminating the chaos of broad war room calls.  

Custom dashboards support predictive intervention by flagging performance issues in critical systems before degradation occurs, while automation scripts take on many routine fixes.  

Executive leadership can now monitor service health in real time and post-incident analysis is faster, better informed and easier to document for regulators. When it comes to day-to-day incident response, Tier 1 operators are empowered to act directly on alerts, reducing time to resolution. 

Perhaps most importantly, the utility is now positioned as an industry leader, with a comprehensive approach to monitoring that serves as a blueprint for others to follow.