Take Back Your Data: Build Intelligence, Don’t Rent It

I keep seeing a wave of new commercials lately. Cisco. GitLab. Dell. IBM. Each one promising “AI-powered insight,” each one showing the same thing — a human dashboard with all kinds of nifty visuals and tools on it. Somewhere along timeline you might see an LLM chat window.

But look closely and you’ll see what’s really going on. None of them are selling artificial intelligence. They’re selling augmented intelligence, the illusion that you can buy understanding as a service.

You can’t.

Understanding still comes from people. The machine only amplifies it.

The truth is, you can build everything they’re showing on one commodity server. Ten thousand dollars of hardware. No contracts. No GPU cloud bills. No vendor markup on your own data.

All it takes is time, cooperation, and a few people who actually understand what the data is saying.

The Mirage of Turnkey Intelligence

Every marketing campaign tells the same story: plug in our product, and your data will finally “talk” to you. But that story skips the part where your data leaves your house.

Once your metrics, logs, and telemetry live in a vendor’s cloud, the balance of power shifts. You stop being the operator and become the consumer of your own infrastructure. You end up renting insight from the very systems you built.

You do not need to do that.

Open source has already given us the full toolkit.
OpenSearch, Grafana, React, Go, Python, and local models like Mistral or Llama run perfectly well on a standard multi-core system. If you want a bit of a boost add even a consumer grade GPU card, python will use it. You can poll your devices, enrich the results, and visualize them in real time.

That’s not science fiction. That’s Tuesday afternoon if you’re given the freedom to work.

Build Locally, Think Globally

When you own your pipelines, you control the story your data tells. You can experiment without asking permission. You can enrich a dataset three different ways and see which one correlates to the truth on the ground.

This is how the next generation of NOC engineers needs to be trained. Not as ticket closers. Not as vendor whisperers. As listeners.

Teach them to listen to the data. Teach them to question why a value spiked, what it means, and what system whispered that change into being. That is how you grow a NOC that can outthink its vendors instead of waiting on them.

The Edge Cases Still Matter

You can automate 99% of the work. I encourage it. Let the systems handle repetition. But that last one percent , that’s where the real story hides.

A model can summarize thousands of modem metrics, but it still takes a human to know that a BIP counter rising on an ONT might mean water in a splice tray two miles away. The model doesn’t have intuition. It doesn’t know what Ohio humidity does to fiber. It doesn’t smell burnt dust on a card slot. You do.

That’s why we’re not replaceable. We’re the validation layer between data and reality.

Don’t Sell Your Soul for Convenience

This isn’t a call to boycott vendors. Use them. Learn from them. But don’t surrender your autonomy for ease. The moment someone tells you that you have to “buy your data back,” the game is over.

Keep your raw data. Keep your enrichment logic. Build your own indexes. If you don’t have the time, fight for it. If you don’t have the cooperation, demand it. Because every bit of data you own outright is one more step toward independence.

Where We’re Going

The future of operations isn’t vendor dashboards or pre-trained models. It’s a generation of engineers who treat data as story of the system, not as a wall of text.

The smartest systems will not replace the human. They will serve as instruments we learn to play. The ones who master that harmony, human intuition backed by open tools, will run circles around those who rented their understanding.

Take back your data. Build your own intelligence.
Because the real revolution isn’t artificial. It’s human.

--Is It Live or Is It Memorex
-Bryan