TierZero Transforms Drata's Incident Response with Always-On Intelligence
How TierZero delivered 67% faster alert response, 42% MTTR reduction, and saved 7,000+ engineering hours per year.
About Drata
Drata is an agentic trust management platform that helps over 8,000 customers automate governance, risk, compliance, and assurance — resulting in a stronger security posture, streamlined security reviews, lower costs, and less time spent preparing for annual audits. Its goal is to deliver continuous trust in every business interaction.
In a world where a single misconfiguration or missed alert can bring major companies to a halt, Drata offers “always-on” monitoring, continuously ingesting data across customer environments to detect risk, uphold security, and maintain compliance 24/7, 365 days a year.
Executive Summary
Drata must process hundreds of alerts per day and conduct 500+ investigations per month to maintain always-on security and compliance for its 8,000+ customers.
To accelerate incident responses by cutting through complex datasets, dashboards, and observability noise, Drata partnered with TierZero to bring AI-powered, context-first investigations directly into engineers' alert and incident mitigation workflows.
TierZero delivered 67% faster alert response times, a 42% reduction in mean time to recovery (MTTR), and saved 7,000+ engineering hours a year by eliminating manual incident investigations and reporting.
Today, 100% of on-call engineers polled said they rely on TierZero for production investigations, and leadership reported 100% satisfaction, transforming incident response from manual firefighting into scalable, always-on intelligence.
The Challenge
Drata's commitment to continuous visibility and monitoring introduced a challenge for its own engineering teams. Alerts and incidents requiring investigation came from both internal systems and external customer environments, often overlapping and compounding into noise that made it difficult to pinpoint true root causes. On average, engineers were required to conduct over 500 investigations per month across alerts and incidents.
Drata developed a sophisticated incident response process with on-call first responders ready to tackle issues as they arose. Still, even with strong processes in place, three systematic challenges slowed resolution and drained engineers of their time:
Timezones
As a global organization, Drata's engineers operate across vastly different timezones. While this enabled round-the-clock coverage, it also created natural gaps in communication and context — introducing friction and delay.
Tribal Knowledge
Certain engineers had deep knowledge of specific applications, while others did not. If the right people were unavailable, teams were left piecing together complex systems from documentation and lengthy investigation.
Alert Noise
Engineers had to manually comb through massive datasets to determine what changed, when it changed, and how it cascaded across systems. Finding the source and severity was immensely difficult.
“Unfortunately, for a lot of the issues, it could take many days to fix fully because of the nature of what we’re doing — continuous monitoring, data synchronizations, pulling in data, and updating our databases.”— Cameron Loughman, Engineering Manager, Drata
Once the source of the issue was found, the fix could take days or even weeks to remediate. Moreover, Loughman's team spent more than 40 hours every month manually summarizing failures, failure sources, and proposed fixes for internal reporting.
Choosing TierZero
“TierZero significantly increased the effectiveness of our incident response. We evaluated alternatives, and it stood out in how quickly it delivered actionable context to engineers.”— Slawek Zabkiewicz, VP of Platform Engineering, Drata
Drata's engineers put forth valiant efforts to resolve incidents as quickly as possible. They attempted to create their own solutions, writing code and running scripts to decipher and connect the logs and traces at hand. However, nothing provided the comprehensive, end-to-end context they required.
Drata and TierZero first launched with a three week pilot. This short window was enough to demonstrate transformative impact. TierZero began by ingesting the colossal observability data stemming from dashboards, logs, metrics, traces, and more. TierZero then deployed specialized AI capabilities directly into Drata's incident response workflows through four core offerings:
AI SRE Agent
Real-time analysis of each alert and immediate responses with investigation results.
AI Digest Agent
Automated reporting and trend analysis, replacing 40+ hours of manual compilation per month.
Claude Code Plugin & MCP
Every engineer receives production context in their coding agents, enabling debugging with speed and accuracy.
Long-term Memory
Team-scoped, customizable AI memory geared towards each team's unique set of challenges.
“TierZero materially changed how our engineers respond to incidents, because all these alerts can now be understood much better. The investigations start with the context and not guesswork like it was before.”— Slawek Zabkiewicz, VP of Platform Engineering, Drata
How TierZero Delivered
Faster, More Accurate AI Root Cause Analysis
When alerts and incidents came in, TierZero's AI SRE Agent automatically analyzed each alert, correlating logs, traces, metrics, recent deployments, historical incidents, and system behavior patterns to point engineers in the right direction and uncover the source of the problem. Drata saw mitigation responses speed up by 67%.
“TierZero is that fast, knowledgeable, staff-level SRE that I need as my right-hand person during a daily deployment.”— Denver Peterson, Senior Manager of Platform Engineering, Drata
Always-On Context Across Timezones
TierZero did not depend on who was online. It delivered context regardless of timezone or geography, acting as a bridge between teams separated by time and availability. It eliminated the need to page sleeping teammates for background, context, or product knowledge.
“TierZero removes timezone dependency. Engineers don’t need to be paged for background context, which reduces fatigue and improves on-call sustainability.”— Slawek Zabkiewicz, VP of Platform Engineering, Drata
AI-Automated Daily Digests & Advanced Analytics
What once took 40+ hours per month of manual compilation and summarization by senior engineers could now be generated by TierZero's AI Digest Agent in minutes, every day. These digest reports produced structured error summaries, reliability trends, and long-term performance insights.
“I didn’t realize how agentic it truly is. It now makes rapid insights I had to manually do myself previously. And the best part is, I don’t have to provide any context, I can just ask!”— Denver Peterson, Senior Manager of Platform Engineering, Drata
AI-Native Debugging in Engineering Workflows
Drata engineers extended TierZero's AI capabilities directly into their development environments using the TierZero Claude Code Plugin and MCP. Instead of switching between observability tools, Slack, and code editors, engineers ask their existing AI coding agents questions about live incidents, historical failures, service dependencies, and recent changes.
“I can get context and help my team without even having access to the observability tool.”— Slawek Zabkiewicz, VP of Platform Engineering, Drata
TierZero is now in every major Slack channel at Drata, and even in private 1:1 conversations. TierZero has become a true partner and shared source of truth, available to everyone, everywhere, at all times.
Results & Impact
“The ROI is real. I can clearly see it, even in how engineers ask questions in our observability tools.”
67% Faster Alert Response
With the AI SRE Agent delivering investigation summaries in Slack, engineers respond to alerts 67% faster. Instead of guessing where to look, engineers start with root cause assessments and actionable insights the moment the alert appears.
42% MTTR Reduction
TierZero dramatically shortened the window between detection and mitigation. What once took days, if not weeks, to unpack and resolve can now be addressed with context, direction, and clarity in minutes.
7,000+ Engineering Hours Saved / Year
By eliminating manual investigation and reporting, engineers reinvest saved time into higher-impact work — building new features, strengthening reliability, and improving the platform for customers.
100% Satisfaction
100% of on-call engineers polled now rely on TierZero for production investigations, and leadership reported 100% satisfaction with TierZero.
What Drata's engineers are saying
“TierZero is one of the best use cases for AI. It is incredibly accurate, saving tons of time going back and forth on a solution.”
“It has removed the huge bottleneck in incident mitigation, pointing us in the right direction so as to reduce the time from acknowledgement, to engagement, to actual mitigation.”
“I cannot live without TierZero. It's my new AI friend.”