Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Application monitoring tools track your application's health, speed, errors, and resource usage in real time. Also called APM tools or application performance monitoring software, these tools are essential for any team running production workloads. The leading options in 2026 are Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Grafana, and Elastic APM for traditional workloads, plus Arize AI, LangSmith, and Weights & Biases for AI observability.

Terraform state doesn't stay put forever. Teams outgrow local state files, consolidate multiple backends into one, switch cloud providers, or decide it's time to move off a platform that's no longer working for them - HCP Terraform's free tier ending and its resource-based pricing is a common trigger these days. Whatever the reason, the state file itself is the part everyone's afraid to touch, because it's the only record of what Terraform thinks your infrastructure actually is.

Standard BGP can be slow to react. See how BFD and BGP Add-Path help improve uptime and path diversity on MegaIX. When peering on a public Internet Exchange (IX), standard BGP behavior can introduce delays during topology changes. But if you use MegaIX, there are workarounds. In this blog, we explain two lesser-used features available on MegaIX which maximize uptime and path diversity: Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) and BGP Add-Path.

A deployment strategy is the method an engineering team uses to release new software to production. The six core deployment strategies are recreate (big bang), rolling update, blue-green, canary, A/B testing, and shadow deployment. Each trades off between downtime risk, rollback speed, infrastructure cost, and complexity. This guide covers all six along with what each strategy actually costs in cloud and AI infrastructure spend.

CloudZero now breaks out Snowflake Cortex spend on its own, so the AI usage buried in your Snowflake bill becomes a line item you can track and allocate before it ramps into a surprise.

AI is pushing code volume up almost everywhere. Shipping it is still the hard part, and the gap between leaders and everyone else is getting wider. Today we’re releasing the 2026 State of Software Delivery Q2 Pulse report, a shorter check-in between our annual reports. We analyzed more than 20 million CircleCI workflows from March 2026 to see what’s changed since the comprehensive 2026 State of Software Delivery report we published in Q1.