Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As the new year begins, development teams are looking to build momentum, set clear goals, and establish reliable, scalable processes that will help them deliver value consistently throughout 2026. That’s why many teams are turning to SQL Toolbelt Essentials: a powerful, easy-to-adopt toolkit that helps teams speed up database development, reduce risk, and standardize workflows.

For many teams, 2024 was the year of asking, “can OpenTelemetry do this?” In 2025, the community answered with a resounding “yes,” moving beyond experimentation to focus on what matters most in practice: stability, ease of use, and cross-project compatibility. That momentum now sets the stage for what’s to come for OpenTelemetry in 2026.

A typical ITOps day is consumed by manual triage, fragmented context, and coordination work that expands with scale and slows every incident. Your day begins with alerts that arrived overnight. The symptoms are partial and the blast radius is unclear, so the first task is not remediation; it is figuring out what is real, what is related, and what matters. Next, a ticket comes in with a brief description and no evidence. Ownership is unclear.

Errors get a bad rap, but they’re just trying to help. Remember, errors aren’t the enemy, they’re the messenger. Conventional wisdom tells you to think of errors as failures, as things that thwart progress and frustrate developers. The reality is that errors are actually there to help you. They prevent you from shipping broken code to production. They stop your application from continuing to operate incorrectly and costing you money.

Logs are often the first place dev teams look when they investigate an issue. But logs are often added as an afterthought, and developers struggle with the balance of logging too much or too little. As a seasoned developer, you may remember a time when you were asked to investigate an issue and then handed a 200 MB plaintext log file. Three hours and four Python scripts later, you would realize that the problem was in a different component.

Choosing between AWS and OCI is a common decision for organizations moving workloads to the cloud. Both Amazon Web Services and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offer global infrastructure, robust security, and broad service portfolios. On paper, the platforms can look interchangeable. They are not. AWS and Oracle Cloud differ in pricing, compute models, storage options, networking, and managed services. These differences affect scalability, reliability, and day-to-day operations.

This article explains why AI-driven automation in incident response is feasible now. Teams can finally safely delegate repetitive and time-critical response tasks to AI Agents, which operate with contextual awareness and human oversight. The result is faster response, higher service uptime, and less alert noise – without losing control. ‍

SQL Prompt’s January release brings support for Microsoft Fabric and an exciting new preview feature.

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) came into force across the EU on January 17, 2025, fundamentally changing how financial institutions must approach infrastructure and technology assets resilience. Its requirements around ICT risk management, operational resilience, and third-party oversight signal a broader shift that will ripple across regulated industries worldwide.

This is blog 2 in our New Year, New Resolution Series on OTel migrations. Read the first post, "New Year, New Telemetry: Resolve to Stop Breaking Dashboards", here. Most New Year’s resolutions fail because they require a "big bang" change. If your 2026 mandate is to migrate to OpenTelemetry (OTel), the traditional approach is the definition of friction.