Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Security teams are generating and storing more telemetry than ever before. Logs, metrics, traces, and events come from cloud services, applications, identities, and infrastructure across many environments. Retention requirements continue to grow, yet the cost of storing all of this data in traditional hot storage can quickly exceed annual budgets. At the same time, investigations and audits rely on fast access to historical data, and any delay can slow response time or limit visibility.

Enterprises are experiencing a turning point. Systems scale faster than teams can, AI is rewriting the rhythms of operations, and the cost of downtime grows heavier every quarter. In this new landscape, reacting is no longer enough. Teams need foresight. They need to get ahead of the issue. They need a different model entirely. This third installment centers on a simple but transformative idea. What if IT operations could finally step out of reaction mode and move into anticipation?

In many organizations, developers, SREs, network engineers, and security teams work in specialized domains, which can make it hard to establish a shared view of network health. As a result, engineers often struggle to determine when a network problem that originates outside of their domain of expertise is the root cause of an incident. This lack of visibility slows investigations and delays remediation.

AI innovation has accelerated faster than most organizations’ ability to monitor and manage it. The shift from experimentation to production-scale workloads has driven a new class of operational challenges: rising GPU costs, opaque model performance, and the difficulty of linking spend to business value. As AI investments grow, executives need a unified way to measure efficiency and return without slowing down innovation.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen incredible adoption of our AI Investigations and Insights reports. Teams are using them to automate the deep, thoughtful analysis required for complex post-mortems, capacity planning, and performance optimization. These comprehensive reports are fantastic when you need a well-researched, shareable document. But what about the moments during an investigation?

What remains of the 2025 AI hype? After a year of “AI will fix everything” promises, engineering teams in 2025 hit a wall of reality: AI is a tool, not a magic bullet. We’re now seeing a more practical approach: identifying broken workflows and tasks where AI can help and leveraging AI strengths like data analysis at speed and scale to derive meaningful, valuable insights. Looking ahead, 2026 will reward organizations that combine AI innovation with a practical approach.

In today’s age of continuous delivery, a failed deployment or a drop in performance can affect thousands of users in just a few minutes. Traditional testing happens before deployment, but what about after the code is live? This is where app synthetic monitoring becomes a critical part of your CI/CD pipeline. Integrating synthetic monitoring into CI/CD transforms your pipeline from a simple delivery mechanism into a proactive quality and performance gatekeeper.

The CNCF reported that between 39% and 56% of organizations surveyed are now ingesting traces as part of their observability strategy. Tracing has become a cornerstone of any modern observability operation. Customers are regularly handling 10s of billions of spans every day, but with billions of spans, how can teams quickly figure out what is changing, what’s breaking, or what’s slowing down?