Outage awareness is a cornerstone of advanced grid reliability, enabling utilities to detect, diagnose and restore outages faster and with greater confidence. This session explores how edge‑based outage awareness, transformer‑level visibility and Pattern Anomaly Classification improve detection accuracy—including nested outages—and pinpoint fault location and type, even in the presence of aging infrastructure and imperfect GIS data. Attendees will dive into utility progress and technical insights, as well as hear best practices for operationalizing these capabilities to improve outage response, validate restoration, enhance customer notifications, detect energized downed conductors and reduce outage duration.