Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As budgets reset for 2026, engineering leaders are making a resolution: no more vendor lock-in. Here’s how to keep that promise by building on the technical foundations of data reliability and simplified collection. It’s January 2026, and if you’re like most engineering leaders, you’re staring at your observability vendor contracts with a mix of frustration and resignation.

A note from Lauren Nagel, Mezmo's VP of Product: At Mezmo, we believe the best observability tools aren't just built for users, they're built with them. Since the launch of Mezmo's AI SRE agent, we've listened and learned from our customers. The feedback and insights have been invaluable in helping our teams refine and enhance the experience. Today, we're excited to share our latest release, packed with improvements and powerful new capabilities that make our AI SRE even faster and more intuitive.

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.

It's 2026. Your New Year's resolution was to finally migrate to OpenTelemetry. But you're staring at dozens of dashboards that depend on your current data format, and that migration deadline is looming... Sound familiar? If you're an SRE or Platform Engineer facing a top-down OTel mandate, you're not alone. The challenge isn't just about adopting a new standard—it's about doing so without disrupting the observability systems your team depends on every day.