Customer Overview
AIG (American International Group) is a leading global insurance organization providing property casualty insurance, life insurance, retirement solutions, and other financial services to customers in more than 70 countries and jurisdictions. As one of the world's most international insurers, AIG companies serve commercial, institutional, and individual customers through extensive property-casualty and life insurance networks.
Operating in the highly regulated financial services sector, AIG manages complex IT infrastructure supporting critical business operations across multiple geographic regions. The company's IT operations team is responsible for maintaining system availability, ensuring regulatory compliance, and managing incident response processes that directly impact customer service and business continuity. With thousands of systems generating continuous log data, effective alert management and incident response capabilities are essential for operational success.
Challenge
Before implementing LogZilla, AIG's IT operations team faced significant challenges with their ServiceNow-based incident management system that were severely impacting operational efficiency and team productivity.
Alert Noise and False Positive Overload
The primary challenge was an overwhelming volume of false positive alerts generating unnecessary ServiceNow tickets. The existing monitoring infrastructure was creating more than 4,000 false positive tickets per week, flooding the incident management system with alerts that required manual investigation but represented no actual operational issues. This massive volume of noise was consuming substantial engineering resources and making it difficult to identify genuine incidents requiring immediate attention.
Resource Drain and Operational Inefficiency
The constant stream of false positives was creating several operational problems. IT staff were spending significant time investigating alerts that ultimately proved to be non-issues, reducing their availability for strategic projects and genuine incident response. The high volume of tickets was also creating backlogs in the ServiceNow system, potentially delaying response to legitimate incidents and impacting overall service quality.
Lack of Intelligent Filtering
AIG's existing monitoring tools lacked sophisticated filtering and correlation capabilities needed to distinguish between genuine alerts requiring action and routine system events that could be safely ignored. Without intelligent pre-processing, every monitoring event was generating ServiceNow tickets regardless of actual business impact or operational significance.
Compliance and Audit Trail Requirements
As a global financial services organization, AIG must maintain comprehensive audit trails and demonstrate effective incident management processes for regulatory compliance. However, the overwhelming volume of false positives was making it difficult to maintain clear documentation of genuine incidents and their resolution, potentially complicating compliance reporting and audit processes.
Solution
AIG implemented LogZilla as an intelligent pre-processor for their ServiceNow incident management system, creating a sophisticated filtering and correlation layer that dramatically improved operational efficiency.
Intelligent Alert Pre-Processing
LogZilla was deployed as a centralized log management and correlation platform positioned between AIG's monitoring infrastructure and ServiceNow. This architecture enabled intelligent analysis of all incoming alerts before they could generate ServiceNow tickets. LogZilla's advanced correlation engine could identify patterns, suppress duplicate events, and apply business logic to determine which alerts truly warranted incident creation.
Real-Time Event Correlation and Filtering
The solution implemented sophisticated event correlation rules that could analyze incoming alerts in real-time, identifying related events and consolidating them into single, meaningful incidents. LogZilla's pattern recognition capabilities enabled the system to learn from historical data and continuously improve its ability to distinguish between genuine incidents and routine operational noise.
Automated Ticket Enrichment
When LogZilla determined that an alert warranted ServiceNow ticket creation, it could automatically enrich the ticket with relevant context, historical information, and suggested remediation steps. This enrichment process ensured that when tickets were created, they contained comprehensive information to enable faster resolution by IT staff.
Implementation Highlights
AIG's LogZilla implementation demonstrates advanced integration capabilities and intelligent automation for enterprise incident management.
ServiceNow Integration Architecture
LogZilla was configured as a middleware layer between AIG's existing monitoring tools and ServiceNow. All monitoring alerts were first routed to LogZilla for analysis and correlation before any ServiceNow tickets were created. This architecture provided complete control over the ticket creation process while maintaining existing monitoring tool investments.
Advanced Correlation Rules Engine
The implementation utilized LogZilla's powerful rules engine to create sophisticated correlation logic specific to AIG's environment. Rules were configured to:
- Identify Duplicate Events: Suppress multiple alerts for the same underlying issue within specified time windows
- Correlate Related Events: Group related alerts from different systems into single, comprehensive incidents
- Apply Business Logic: Evaluate alert severity and business impact before determining ticket creation necessity
- Historical Pattern Analysis: Learn from past incidents to improve future correlation accuracy
Automated Workflow Integration
LogZilla was integrated with ServiceNow's REST API to enable seamless ticket creation when genuine incidents were identified. The integration included:
- Automated ticket creation with enriched context and priority assignment
- Real-time status updates between LogZilla and ServiceNow
- Bidirectional communication for ticket lifecycle management
- Custom field mapping to ensure comprehensive incident documentation
Continuous Learning and Optimization
The system was configured with feedback mechanisms that enabled continuous improvement of correlation rules based on ticket resolution outcomes. When IT staff resolved tickets, the resolution information was fed back to LogZilla to refine future correlation decisions and further reduce false positives.
Results
The LogZilla implementation delivered immediate and dramatic improvements in AIG's incident management efficiency and operational effectiveness. AIG eliminated more than 4,000 false positive tickets per week using LogZilla as a pre-processor to ServiceNow.
Massive Reduction in False Positive Tickets
The most significant outcome was the elimination of more than 4,000 false positive ServiceNow tickets per week. This represented a dramatic reduction in alert noise that had previously been consuming substantial IT resources and creating operational inefficiencies. The intelligent filtering capabilities ensured that only genuine incidents requiring human intervention generated ServiceNow tickets.
Dramatic Improvement in Operational Efficiency
By eliminating thousands of unnecessary tickets weekly, AIG's IT operations team could focus their attention on genuine incidents and strategic projects. The reduction in alert noise enabled faster response times to legitimate issues and improved overall service quality. Staff productivity increased significantly as engineers were no longer spending time investigating false alarms.
Streamlined Alert Management Process
The integration created a streamlined workflow where alerts were automatically analyzed, correlated, and filtered before reaching the ServiceNow system. This process eliminated manual triage steps and ensured that tickets created in ServiceNow contained comprehensive, actionable information for rapid resolution.
Enhanced Incident Response Quality
With false positives eliminated, the remaining ServiceNow tickets represented genuine incidents that required attention. This improved signal-to-noise ratio enabled IT staff to respond more effectively to real issues and maintain higher service levels for critical business systems.
Why LogZilla
AIG selected LogZilla for its unique combination of advanced correlation capabilities, enterprise integration features, and proven scalability in financial services environments.
Advanced Event Correlation Engine
LogZilla's sophisticated correlation engine provided the intelligent filtering capabilities that AIG needed to distinguish between genuine incidents and routine operational noise. The platform's ability to analyze patterns, suppress duplicates, and apply complex business logic was essential for achieving the dramatic reduction in false positives.
Enterprise Integration Capabilities
The platform's robust API and integration framework enabled seamless connection with ServiceNow while maintaining existing monitoring tool investments. LogZilla's middleware approach allowed AIG to enhance their incident management process without requiring wholesale replacement of existing infrastructure.
Financial Services Compliance Features
LogZilla's comprehensive audit trail capabilities and compliance reporting features aligned with AIG's regulatory requirements. The platform could maintain detailed records of all alert processing decisions and incident management activities, supporting compliance with financial services regulations including SOX, GLBA, and PCI DSS requirements.
Scalability and Performance
As a global financial services organization, AIG required a solution that could handle high-volume log processing and real-time correlation at enterprise scale. LogZilla's architecture provided the performance and scalability needed to process thousands of alerts while maintaining sub-second response times for critical incident detection.
Next Steps
Building on the success of the ServiceNow integration, AIG continues to expand LogZilla's role in their IT operations ecosystem. The organization is exploring additional automation opportunities including proactive monitoring capabilities, enhanced compliance reporting, and integration with additional ITSM tools. The proven model of intelligent alert pre-processing provides a foundation for further operational improvements across AIG's global IT infrastructure, with potential applications in security incident response, performance monitoring, and regulatory compliance automation.