Against SaaS AIOps agents.
The platforms that investigate your incidents from their cloud. Genuinely good at what they are. Here is where the postures divide.
First, the honest case for them: a SaaS agent means zero footprint in your cluster, onboarding measured in minutes, investigation quality that benefits from the vendor’s view across thousands of customers, and mature enterprise trappings, SSO, SCIM, support organizations, certifications we do not have. If your threat model accepts operational data leaving your boundary and your reviewers accept the vendor’s logs as your audit trail, SaaS is the simpler purchase. Many good teams make it.
The honest table
The same ten questions, answered by both.
No checkmarks. Every cell a fact a reader could verify, including the cells where the simpler posture is genuinely theirs.
PLACEMENT
| The question | SaaS AIOps agents | Infraware |
|---|---|---|
| Where does it run? | Vendor cloud; agents/collectors in your estate. Zero infrastructure for you to operate, their real advantage. | In your cluster, by Helm. You operate one more deployment; that is the honest cost of the boundary. |
| Where does your data go? | Telemetry and investigation context to the vendor platform, under their controls and certifications. | Stays in your cluster. Only your configured LLM traffic leaves, or nothing, with the model in-cluster. |
| Who owns the model? | Typically the vendor's model choices, on their keys. | You: Anthropic, OpenRouter, Mistral on your keys, or vLLM fully local. |
BOUNDARIES
| The question | SaaS AIOps agents | Infraware |
|---|---|---|
| What can it do without a human? | Varies, several offer auto-remediation as the headline. | Read-only investigation only. Structural, not a setting. |
| Is the command surface finite? | Generally broad platform/cloud API access; surface defined by integrations. | A fixed allowlist of read-only command prefixes; a quote-aware parser rejects anything it can't fully parse. |
| What happens on failure? | Varies by vendor; ask them the failure-mode question directly. | The system does less: parse errors reject, no report means no action, downed components pause investigation. |
ACCOUNTABILITY
| The question | SaaS AIOps agents | Infraware |
|---|---|---|
| Whose identity executes? | The integration's service credential. | A Kubernetes Job under a ServiceAccount mapped from the human who approved, read and write principals split. |
| Who approved, on what evidence, what ran? | Vendor-side activity logs answer "what did the agent do." | The audit entry answers all three, per command, in your cluster. |
| Where does the record live? | Vendor platform; export per their retention and your plan. | Your storage. Query it and keep it without asking anyone. |
PROOF
| The question | SaaS AIOps agents | Infraware |
|---|---|---|
| Verify before you pay? | Free trials of their cloud; price typically by quote. | Reproducible failure scenarios in your own cluster; pilot scoped on one call, one number, fixed. |
The fastest comparison is not this table. Watch both investigate the same broken cluster, ours breaks it for you, in your environment, on demand.
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