Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Running workloads across AWS, Azure, and GCP is the operational reality for most enterprise engineering teams. The challenge isn't the providers themselves, it's what happens when each one accumulates its own delivery pipeline, its own security configuration, and its own environment management tooling. What starts as provider flexibility quietly becomes provider-specific complexity, multiplied across every team that ships.

Historically, non-technical stakeholders would’ve had most of their data questions answered either through pre-built dashboards or by asking their Data team (or equivalent). Self-serve analytics tools went a step further by offering safe, governed datasets built by Data teams which let non-technical users dig into data without having to worry about how it joins together, how metrics like “revenue” are defined, and so on.

Cursor, Claude, and their fellow tools are great when they are speaking code, but once that code hits production, they are not exactly native. However, if your code is monitored by AppSignal, an MCP server can bridge that gap and allow agents to poke around the production.

Ask most enterprises why their AI program hasn't moved past pilots, and you'll get an answer about the model. It's not accurate enough, not fast enough, not cheap enough yet. Srikanth Akkiraju, who has run transformation at Philips and now at ServiceNow, doesn't buy it. In a recent fireside conversation with iOPEX, he made the case that the model was never the problem. The problem is that most enterprises haven't decided what they actually want AI to change. Five questions came out of that conversation.

AI has quickly become one of the largest and fastest-growing enterprise expenses, exposing many of the same governance and visibility challenges organizations previously faced with cloud. Based on findings from the 2026 State of AI in FinOps report, we explore how mature organizations improve AI cost ownership, reduce waste, and build a culture focused on measurable business value.

When organizations evaluate a software upgrade, the conversation typically centers on risk. Teams consider the maintenance window, the resources required to prepare for the change, the possibility of unexpected issues, and the operational impact of the upgrade itself. These are all legitimate concerns because the people responsible for enterprise platforms are accountable for maintaining service availability while introducing change into complex environments.

When more than 140,000 people reach for their phones at once and see nothing but the letters SOS, the topic of incident response stops being an abstract engineering concern and becomes something everyone feels. That is exactly what happened on the evening of July 27 into the morning of July 28, 2026, when a nationwide T-Mobile outage knocked huge numbers of devices into SOS only mode, cutting people off from regular calls, texts, and data.