Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Don't pay for metrics, pay for change: The 2026 guide to engineering metrics

Most engineering leaders are drowning in data but starved for insight. We have dashboards full of metrics, but they often create more questions than answers and rarely tell us what to do next. In the age of AI, where development velocity is accelerating at an unprecedented rate, this problem is only getting worse. Shipping code faster than you can fix it is an existential risk, and a dashboard that doesn't lead to action is just a distraction.

Your platform is your business, encoded onto your infra, with Syntasso's Abby Bangser

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Abby Bangser, a platform engineering leader at Syntasso and former lead of the CNCF Platforms Working Group, to talk about why AI agents need real platform APIs, not raw cloud credentials.

AI didn't take humans off the platform, it just changed the job they do there.

Agents are writing more of the code these days, but that doesn't make them the only user of your platform. Abby Bangser, Principal Engineer at Syntasso and CNCF Ambassador, makes the distinction: the agent might be your primary coder, while humans are still validating what it builds and interacting with the system it runs on. From a Braintrust conversation with engineering leaders on AI agents and engineering operations.

DRIVE Deep Dive: Efficiency

This is the fifth and final post in the DRIVE Deep Dive series, following Delivery, Reliability, Initiatives, and Vigilance. For the complete model across all five pillars, download the full DRIVE framework. -- Engineering money and time land in three places a leadership review can actually act on: the cloud bill, the internal spend on AI and LLM tokens, and the split between building new things and keeping old ones running.

Your platform team isn't a ticket queue, here's the fix.

Centralized ops creates a single point of failure: every request waits in line, and your best engineers spend their day gatekeeping instead of building. Self-service APIs change that. Developers get what they need without filing a ticket, and platform teams get their time back for the infrastructure work that actually moves the needle. Still routing everything through one central team? Tell us your setup in the comments.

Cortex | Enhanced Filters in Engineering Intelligence

Filtering in Engineering Intelligence just got a lot more precise. In this Feature Friday, Principal Product Manager Christine Byun walks through the enhanced filters now live across the platform, using PR cycle time in the Data Explorer as an example. What's new: Try it out in Engineering Intelligence today.

Cortex Platform Walkthrough

In this video, Becka gives a guided tour of Cortex, the Engineering Operations Platform that runs mission control for your AI software factory. Learn how to centralize visibility, clarify ownership, and automate standards across your entire software ecosystem. What we cover: Why Cortex: Cortex is where engineering leaders run mission control for the AI software factory: the visibility, intelligence, and controls to keep teams shipping fast without letting accelerated output turn into accumulated risk to reliability, security, and cost.

DRIVE Deep Dive: Vigilance

This is the fourth post in our DRIVE Deep Dive series. Over the coming weeks we're examining each pillar of the DRIVE framework in turn. For the complete model, download the full DRIVE framework. Our last post covered Initiatives. Up next: Efficiency. The bottleneck on writing code is gone, and the industry is responding the way it always does when a constraint disappears: by producing more.

Cortex | Tabular Views Now in Public Beta

The World Cup is down to the final two, and so is Cortex's Coming Home Dashboard. In this Feature Friday, VP of Strategic Initiatives & Marketing Cristina Buenahora walks through an update on the Coming Home Dashboard she and Edward Spencer built a month ago, and the product update behind it. What she covers: Whether you're tracking brackets or tracking engineering maturity, the view's the same. Reach out to your CSM to try it.

Tealium's Dr. Martin Nettling on reviewing AI-generated work

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Dr. Martin Nettling, Senior Director of Engineering and Head of QA at Tealium, to explore the distinction between trusting people and having confidence in tools, and why that difference matters as AI becomes part of every engineering workflow.

Cortex Scorecards + DRIVE: measure engineering org health, not just output

Most engineering metrics track individual output. DRIVE measures the health of the system as a whole. In this Feature Friday, Director of Customer Education and Delivery Taylor Schmidt walks through Cortex's DRIVE scorecard and dashboard, a framework covering five pillars: delivery, reliability, initiatives, vigilance, and efficiency.

DORA measures delivery. DRIVE measures the organization behind it.

You can hit every DORA target and still be losing ground. Deploy frequency up, lead time down, change failure rate and MTTR both healthy, but underneath it could be hiding an organization slowly getting worse at turning work into reliable software. New services shipping without clear owners, an attack surface widening faster than anyone is tracking, on-call rotations quietly filling up, a migration that was supposed to close last quarter still limping along.

DRIVE Deep Dive: Reliability

This is the second post in our DRIVE Deep Dive series. Over the coming weeks we're examining each pillar of the DRIVE framework in turn, and mapping DRIVE against the frameworks engineering leaders already run on, including DORA and SPACE. For the complete model, download the full DRIVE framework. Our last post covered Delivery. Up next: Initiatives. --- AI has removed the last real constraint on producing code, and organizations are shipping more of it than ever.