Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and share practical ways to stay ahead. This week, let’s look at a few simple ways to take back control of your recommendations, and stop your algorithm from deciding who you are. Let's say you search for a video about running—not because you're planning to run a marathon, but because you just saw someone mention it and wondered what the hype was about. You watch one video. Then another.

GenAI has moved well past the pilot stage. According to a Gartner finding, by 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will have used GenAI APIs or deployed GenAI-enabled applications in production. Today, GenAI is becoming an integral part of how infrastructure and application teams work every day. Organizations are depending on LLMs from a diverse range of vendors—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google AI, and DeepSeek—based on the strengths each offer for different use cases.

Microsoft Azure Monitor is the native monitoring platform for Azure environments. For teams already running workloads in Azure, it offers an obvious starting point: it's built in, deeply integrated, and parts of it are genuinely free.

Monitoring has come a long way. Your team has dashboards, alerts, and automation that would've looked like magic a decade ago. Most days, things just work. But underneath all that tooling, a lot of the actual work still happens manually. An alert fires, and you pull the page-load metric from one tool, the user session logs from another, the backend trace from a third, and line them up until the story makes sense. Ten minutes, maybe fifteen pass, then you are able to fix it and move on.

In 2026, a hybrid cloud is no longer something organizations are working toward; it's already where they are. According to Forrester's The State Of Cloud Series 2026, the vast majority of enterprises across major markets, including the United States, India, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and the Asia-Pacific region, are running some form of a hybrid cloud, combining public cloud platforms with private infrastructure, colocation data centers, and sovereign cloud providers.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and share ways to stay ahead. This week, let's look at a few ways you can be a tech-savvy traveler. Being a traveler is not easy, but with today's modern technology, it has become much easier. When we travel to places with no network, we sometimes forget about the ways we can use technology. Excluding the more familiar, I'm going to list some lesser-known tips. 1.