Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As IT environments become more distributed, automated, and AI-driven, 2026 will represent a major inflection point for how organizations manage networks, security, and operational resilience. From shadow AI and governance to AI-driven automation and economic uncertainty, Auvik’s executive leadership team shares their predictions on what’s coming, and what IT leaders and MSPs should be preparing for now.

This article is part of our series on how Datadog engineering teams use LLM Observability to build, monitor, and improve AI-powered systems. At Datadog, we’re always looking for ways to make complex data easier to explore.

Sometimes the most interesting engineering stories don’t start with a roadmap or a release plan—they start with personal taste. A preference for good design. A frustration with clunky tools. A desire to see everything in one place.

InfluxDB 3 Model Context Protocol (MCP) server lets you manage and query InfluxDB 3 (Core, Enterprise, Dedicated, Serverless, Clustered) using natural language through popular LLM tools like Claude Desktop, ChatGPT Desktop, and other MCP-compatible agents. The setup is straightforward. In this article, we will focus on setting up InfluxDB 3 Enterprise using Docker with Claude Desktop.

The Optus CEO resigned in 2023 after a routine software upgrade killed emergency services for an entire day. Two years and $12 million in fines later, the exact same failure happened again. Same root cause, same chaos, different executive taking the fall. Governance expert Helen Bird's diagnosis was surgical.

The inevitable happened. A while back, Gartner projected that in 2026, 30–50% of all new SaaS product features would use LLM inference. That meant OpenAI-style costs would become a standard part of SaaS COGS. Today, OpenAI has become one of the most operationally significant line items for SaaS companies. But for many teams, this creates an uncomfortable gap. Engineering sees OpenAI as a fast path to innovation.

Financial services AI demands more than models and prompts. Context engineering provides real-time, governed, and explainable intelligence with Elastic serving as the foundational context layer. Artificial intelligence in financial services is no longer constrained by model capability. The real bottleneck is context.

For much of the past decade, many of the most ambitious ideas in artificial intelligence lived primarily in research papers, labs, and long-term roadmaps. Agentic AI was no exception. The concept of AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, and acting autonomously was widely discussed but largely theoretical. But earlier this month, Gartner released its report The Future of NetOps Is Agentic, reflecting a growing consensus that this has changed. What was once conceptual is now becoming operational.

Every application tells a story of user intent, system behavior, and business impact. To truly understand how your application performs, you need to go beyond logs and errors. You need metrics that provide actionable visibility across your stack. Application performance metrics are the foundation for delivering high-quality digital experiences, and they empower DevOps teams, developers, engineers, and site reliability engineers (SREs) to respond faster, scale smarter, and continuously improve.