Against SaaS AIOps agents.
The platforms that investigate your incidents from their cloud. Good at what they are. Here is where the postures divide.
The short version
When to choose which.
Choose a SaaS agent when
- Operational data may leave your boundary
- Your reviewers accept the vendor’s logs as your audit trail
- You want nothing to operate and onboarding in minutes
- You need SSO, SCIM, a support organisation and certifications today
- You value a vendor’s view across thousands of customers
Choose Infraware when
- Operational data has to stay in your cluster
- Someone will ask who approved a specific change, and on what evidence
- The record must be yours, without asking a vendor for it
- You want your own model, on your own key or inside your boundary
- Nothing should write to production without a named engineer
Question by question
The same ten questions, answered by both.
| The question | SaaS AIOps agents | Infraware |
|---|---|---|
| Placement3 questions | ||
| Where does it run? | Vendor cloud Agents or collectors in your estate. Nothing for you to operate, their real advantage. | Your cluster One Helm install. You operate one more deployment: the cost of the boundary. |
| Where does your data go? | To the vendor platform Telemetry and investigation context, under their controls and certifications. | It stays in your cluster Only the calls to the model endpoint you configure leave it. |
| Who owns the model? | The vendor Typically their model choices, on their keys. | You Anthropic, OpenRouter or Mistral on your keys, or an open-weight model served with vLLM or llama.cpp. |
| Boundaries3 questions | ||
| What can it do without a human? | It varies Several offer auto-remediation as the headline. | Read-only work Structural, not a setting. |
| Is the command surface finite? | Defined by integrations Generally broad platform and cloud API access. | A fixed allowlist Read-only command prefixes; a quote-aware parser rejects anything it cannot fully parse. |
| What happens on failure? | It varies by vendor Ask them the failure-mode question directly. | It does less Parse errors reject, no report means no action, downed components pause the investigation. |
| Accountability3 questions | ||
| Whose identity executes? | The integration’s service credential | A dedicated write account A Kubernetes Job under a write ServiceAccount, split from the read principal. The audit entry names the human who approved. |
| Who approved, on what evidence, what ran? | What the agent did Vendor-side activity logs answer that one question. | All three, per command The audit entry answers them, in your cluster. |
| Where does the record live? | On the vendor platform Export per their retention and your plan. | In your storage Query it and keep it without asking anyone. |
| Proof1 question | ||
| Verify before you pay? | A free trial of their cloud Price typically by quote. | In your own cluster Reproducible failure scenarios; the pilot scoped on one call, one number, fixed. |
How to start