It's 2:47 AM. Your phone won't stop buzzing. PagerDuty. Then Slack. Then your manager texting "you seeing this?"
You stumble to your laptop, eyes half-open, muscle memory typing your VPN password wrong twice. Finally in. Now the dance begins: AWS console to check if EC2 instances are healthy. CrowdStrike to see if something got flagged. Okta to verify no one's account got compromised. Back to AWS because you forgot to check the security groups.
Four tabs. Four logins. Four MFA prompts. Twenty minutes gone before you even understand the problem.
Sound familiar?
We've lived this. For over a decade. And we got tired of it.
The Story Behind {P}eelOps
I started on the helpdesk. Password resets. Printer jams. Explaining to users why "password123" wasn't going to cut it. ("But it has a number!")
Worked my way up. Desktop support. Sysadmin. Security analyst. Eventually leading IT and security operations. Every step of the way, the same frustration: the tools that were supposed to help us were scattered across a dozen dashboards, each with its own login, its own interface, its own special way of doing things.
Every vendor promised a "single pane of glass." Funny how we ended up with fifteen panes and a migraine.
So we built what we actually needed. Not what some product manager thought IT people wanted. What we wished existed during those 3 AM calls, those audit prep crunches, those "quick questions" from the CEO that ate entire afternoons.
The Problems We Know Too Well
These aren't hypothetical scenarios. These are last Tuesday:
The "Not Now" That Always Happens Now
Phone buzzes. Heart rate spikes. You're dropping your kids off at kindergarten, one hand on the stroller, the other pulling out your phone. Or you're at a wedding, sneaking glances at Slack under the table while everyone's toasting the happy couple. Or it's 3 AM and you're squinting at tiny text, waiting for pages to load over hotel WiFi because of course this happened while you're traveling.
You need to check three systems to even start understanding what's happening. But each one requires a different app, a different login, a different everything. By the time you've context-switched enough to piece things together, you've missed the ceremony, your kid is asking why you're always on your phone, or you're wide awake at 4 AM with no chance of getting back to sleep.
The "Quick Question" That Wasn't
CEO walks by your desk at 4:30 PM on a Friday. "Hey, that ransomware thing in the news - are we affected?"
Quick question. Sure.
Now you're querying CrowdStrike for any related IOCs. Checking Okta for suspicious logins. Pulling the vulnerability scanner for exposed systems. Cross-referencing with your asset inventory (which is a spreadsheet because the "real" CMDB project keeps getting delayed). Writing up a summary that's detailed enough to be useful but simple enough for someone who doesn't know what a CVE is.
That "quick question" just became your evening.
The Audit Prep Panic
"We need evidence of all privileged access across systems. You have until Friday."
It's Monday. Cool.
Each platform exports differently. AWS gives you JSON. Okta gives you CSV but with weird encoding. CrowdStrike's export has columns you don't need and is missing the ones you do. You're spending more time wrestling with Excel than actually reviewing the data.
And somewhere in the back of your mind, you know you did all this three months ago for the last audit. But those exports are buried in your Downloads folder, and the naming convention you promised yourself you'd use... didn't happen.
The Weekend Script That Became Your Job
The vendor dashboard doesn't show what you need. The filter doesn't work the way you want. So you spend a Saturday writing a Python script to hit the API directly. It works. You're proud of it.
Six months later, the API changed. The script breaks. You're the only one who knows how it works. And now "maintaining that script" is somehow part of your job description.
You didn't sign up to be a developer. You signed up to keep systems secure.
The Copy-Paste Prayer
"We need this data for the report."
The platform shows it beautifully on screen. Rows and columns. Perfect. But export? There's no export button. Seriously. A six-figure security tool with no export button.
So you highlight everything. Ctrl+A. Ctrl+C. Open Excel. Ctrl+V. And pray.
Half the columns are merged. The formatting is destroyed. Some rows didn't copy at all. You spend the next hour manually fixing a spreadsheet because someone decided export wasn't a "core feature."
The Tax Nobody Talks About
Research says it takes 23 minutes to refocus after switching tasks. How many tabs do you have open right now? How many times today did you bounce between systems just to answer one question?
It's death by a thousand context switches. And somehow this is just "the job."
What We Actually Built
{P}eelOps isn't another dashboard promising to consolidate everything. We've heard that pitch. We've been burned by that pitch.
Instead, we built a command center. Connect your tools once - AWS, CrowdStrike, Okta, VirusTotal, whatever else you're juggling - then query them all from one place. Same interface. Same experience. Whether you're at your desk or staring at your phone in a dark hotel room.
Your Phone Becomes a Command Center
That 2 AM incident? Pull up {P}eelOps on your phone. Run the same commands you'd run on your laptop. Get the same results. No VPN required. No squinting at mobile-hostile interfaces.
We built this mobile-first because we know where you'll actually be using it. (Spoiler: not always at your desk.)
No More Weekend Scripts
We built the queries so you don't have to. Dozens of pre-built commands for AWS, CrowdStrike, Okta, and more. Click run. Get results. No Python required. No API documentation rabbit holes. No scripts to maintain when vendors change their endpoints.
Every Query, Every Result, Saved
Remember that audit question about "what did this look like three months ago?"
Every command you run gets timestamped and stored. Search your history. Compare results over time. When the auditors come knocking, you're not recreating data - you're pulling it up.
Export That Actually Works
CSV, Excel, JSON, Text. One click. Every time.
No copy-paste prayers. No formatting disasters. No "please contact your account manager for enterprise export features." Just your data, in the format you need, when you need it.
AI That Earns Its Keep
Got 500 lines of JSON from an API response? Select it. Click summarize. Get the key findings in plain English.
Not "AI-powered insights" marketing speak. Actual useful summaries you can paste into that email to management. The one where they need to understand what happened without wading through technical details.
What's Next
We're building based on what IT and security people actually tell us they need:
- More integrations - Azure AD, Splunk, Datadog, and the other twelve tools on your "maybe someday we'll consolidate" list
- Scheduled monitoring - Set a command to run daily. Get alerted when something changes. Stop manually checking things that should check themselves
- Team workspaces - Share commands with your team. Stop re-inventing the same queries. Tribal knowledge shouldn't live in one person's head (or leave when they do)
- Change detection - Compare today's results to yesterday's. See exactly what changed. No more squinting at two JSON blobs trying to spot the difference
Why We're Different
We're not a VC-funded startup with growth targets and a mandate to "disrupt" your workflow. We don't have a board asking why you're not using more "AI features."
We're IT and security people who got tired of building internal tools to work around the tools we'd already paid for. We built {P}eelOps because we needed it. Because we were sick of the 3 AM scramble, the audit prep panic, the context-switching tax that nobody ever budgeted for.
This is the tool we wish existed when we were on call, troubleshooting from a phone in one hand and a crying baby in the other, with Slack blowing up asking for updates.
Try It
We're in beta. Things might break. We'll fix them fast.
Sign up. Connect a tool. Run a command. Then tell us what's missing - what would make your 3 AM calls less painful, your audit prep less chaotic, your daily grind a little more manageable.
We're building this with you. Because we're still in the trenches too.
And honestly? We're tired of the dashboard shuffle just like you are.
Enjoyed this post?
Subscribe to get new posts and product updates delivered to your inbox.