Qiddiya Tech Intelligent Command Centre

At the core of Qiddiya’s vision is an advanced, unified observability hub that operates proactively in support of its strategic objectives. With a landscape of multiple clouds, PaaS and SaaS platforms and a data center serving offices and a growing number of asset sites, a command center was essential to growth and operational excellence. The objectives were to:

●        Availability: maintain 24x7 availability of all IT, OT and IoT systems, including key services, applications, infrastructure and network.

●        Unified monitoring: implement an advanced, unified IT/OT/IoT monitoring hub, the Intelligent Command Centre (ICC), to support corporate goals proactively.

●        Full-stack coverage: monitor applications, databases, messaging, middleware, virtual systems, cloud, servers, network and every other IT/OT/IoT element.

●        Visibility and efficiency: achieve high visibility, faster issue resolution and greater efficiency for smooth operations and excellent service.

2026

In 2026, the focus moved from building to running. Structured knowledge transfer covered five monitoring platforms, followed by a 45-day operational takeover with readiness gates. Since 1 October 2026, the ICC has run as a 24x7 managed service, combining an on-site team in Riyadh with remote engineering teams, while a fellowship of 12 Saudi graduates trains to operate it.

The roadmap now takes the ICC from managed to predictive operations, linking business KPIs to technical metrics and adding automated root cause analysis and self-healing infrastructure as more of the city comes online.

Observability platform cloud-hosted, full-stack observability with AI-driven anomaly detection, event correlation & root cause analysis, acting as the manager of managers and single pane of glass

Infrastructure & network monitoring servers, virtual environments, network devices, data center & server room infrastructure

Cloud & SaaS integrations native API integrations with private & public cloud environments, ERP & productivity platforms

Security monitoring security information & event management (SIEM), network threat detection, endpoint protection & cloud security posture monitoring

OT & IoT visibility passive network monitoring & threat detection for ride, building management and smart systems.

Service management and automation IT service management for incident, problem & change, with automated ticketing & scripted remediation.

Integration & continuity API management for business services & a crisis management platform.

Control room video wall, operator workstations & real-time dashboards

The project does not use solutions from the Global CIO catalog

The ICC had to serve a destination that is still being built. Corporate offices sit across several locations, and each new asset, from the entertainment district to the theme park and water park, opens on its own timeline with its own operator, vendors, systems and OT. The platform had to bring each one in without redesign, while staying ready for assets not yet built.

The sites added their own constraints: isolated networks with partial connectivity, overlapping IP ranges, and the need for low latency between every site and the center. Hosting had to remain within the Kingdom to comply with data residency rules, at a time when several major cloud providers had not yet opened local regions. The estate mixes private and public clouds, SaaS products with limited telemetry, on-premises systems, and safety-critical OT networks where only passive monitoring is possible. All of this had to move into live 24/7 operations without disrupting assets already open to guests.

Qiddiya is one of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 giga-projects: a new city for entertainment, sports and culture near Riyadh, planned to welcome 50 million visitors a year by 2030 across more than 275 rides and attractions, sports venues and cultural facilities. Behind it sits a technology estate that grows with every asset that opens: private and public cloud environments, ERP and productivity platforms delivered as PaaS and SaaS, an expanding application and database landscape, a data center and the operational technology that runs rides, buildings and smart systems across multiple sites.

Before the ICC, this estate was monitored in silos. Infrastructure, applications and security each had their own tools, critical applications had limited visibility, and service management ran on separate instances, making end-to-end service levels hard to manage. As new assets opened, that model would have multiplied outages, left leaders without a real-time picture, and widened security exposure.

The program began in early 2025 with a vision and blueprint. It set a clear north star, a centralized, cloud-based platform for proactive monitoring, and four principles: proactivity through automation and AI, scalability, a standard technology platform, and no critical element going live unobserved. It defined four observability domains (infrastructure, applications, cybersecurity, and smart solutions covering OT and IoT), supported by an Observability Centre of Excellence and a crisis management function. A benchmark of cloud providers set the hosting approach within the Kingdom, and an onboarding score with four transformation paths gave every application owner a clear route into the ICC.

Governance and the operating model followed: roles, KPIs, a 24x7 support model with L1 and L1.5 help desks, and a clear P1-to-P4 escalation ladder. The platform was then deployed as a single pane of glass, joining infrastructure, application, security and OT/IoT monitoring with IT service management and automation, so that alerts become tickets and tickets become fixes. Corporate applications and the first live assets, an entertainment district, a theme park and a water park, were brought under one view, and the ICC was unveiled at the corporate IT office on 11 November 2025.

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Qiddiya City and Riyadh, where the command center is set up  in the corporate IT office. The service runs 24x7, with an on-site team in Riyadh and remote engineering teams in Europe.