Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re already running or are familiar with Home Assistant, you’ve likely worked with integrations, maybe a few automations, and possibly MQTT as a way to wire devices together. But webhooks add another layer of flexibility that lets you level up your smart home into a fully-customized, intelligent network. Instead of relying on built-in integrations and being confined to the same local network, you can let external devices and services push events directly into Home Assistant.

Keeping track of your Microsoft 365 services just got easier. We’ve rolled out an update to the Microsoft 365 integration that removes manual setup and improves visibility. All services in your account can now automatically appear as components, so you can monitor them right away.

We’ve upgraded the Reports page in StatusGator to give you more insight directly inside the StatusGator dashboard. Previously, reporting was limited to exports you could use to calculate your own uptime percentages and trends. Now, in addition to exported reports, you can view key reports and metrics without needing to download anything. We’ve also added a one-click download of the most commonly requested report: Uptime percentage by monitor.

A customer pings support: “I tried to check out twice this morning and got a 500 each time, but it works fine for everyone else.” The session ID is in the email. You have full request/response capture in your environment, you have Datadog Synthetics already running browser checks against the same flow, and you still spend the next two hours grepping logs because none of those tools let you say “show me just this user’s requests, in order, and re-run them.”

The promise of AI in IT service management has been circulating for years. Chatbots that deflect tickets. Virtual agents that answer FAQs. Automation that routes requests. These are useful, but probably not the dream-state you were originally sold. What's different today is the arrival of agentic AI: systems that don't just respond to instructions but reason, act, and adapt across multi-step workflows with real consequences. The question for IT leaders is no longer whether to adopt agentic ITSM.

Last year, at the annual conference for an open source framework you've definitely heard of, I walked up to the founder in a room outside the main stage. He was hunched over his laptop, frantic. We've known each other for a few years. "What's going on? Is everything okay?" He looked up with the specific shade of white people only get when they realize they've made a big mistake.

Context engineering is the practice of managing the information an AI model sees (documents, tool outputs, memory, and structured metadata about the systems it reasons over) so it can make accurate decisions inside a real engineering organization. Most engineering teams have access to the same AI coding agents: Claude, GPT, Gemini, the major variants everyone is shipping. The model is no longer the differentiator.

I recently gave a talk at Experts Live India 2026 about SquaredUp, and even before getting into the demo, there was one question I knew I had to address: Is the dashboard era over? It's something we're all hearing more. "Just ask AI." "Agentic AI will build your dashboards automatically." "Why bother with static views when a chatbot can answer anything?" It's a fair question. Answering it requires a clear understanding of what a dashboard represents.

Quick Answer A Network Operations Center (NOC) — pronounced “knock” — is a centralized physical or virtual facility where IT professionals monitor, manage, and maintain an organization’s network infrastructure on a 24/7/365 basis. The NOC serves as the nerve center for detecting incidents, coordinating responses, and ensuring maximum network availability and performance.

When an unexpected alert fires these days, most engineers' first move is to ask their AI assistant for help.You ask why your checkout service is slow and the assistant gets to work, but it can't get any meaningful insights—at least not quickly—without the proper guidance. So, the next thing you know you're sharing deals about your existing data sources, the services you have running, how they connect, which labels and metrics matter, and on and on.