Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When a production incident strikes, a sudden latency spike, a cascading API failure, a service returning 500s at scale, every minute of downtime has a cost. Root cause analysis (RCA) is the process that turns that chaos into a clear answer: what actually broke, and why. Not the symptom that triggered the alert. The underlying cause.

A more reliable agent that learns your schema, queries your data, and investigates alerts - that’s what’s possible with this release of our MCP server v1.3.0.

How do you know if your network is actually healthy right now? For most IT teams, answering that question means jumping between multiple tools, dashboards, and alerts, only to end up with more uncertainty than clarity. The problem is not missing data. It is knowing which signals matter, what normal really looks like, and when performance issues start affecting users and business operations. Modern networks generate thousands of metrics every minute, but not every spike or alert deserves attention.

The best cloud monitoring tools are Hyperping (uptime, server monitoring, status pages, and on-call at a flat rate), Datadog (full-stack observability with the broadest integration catalog), New Relic (usage-based observability with the most generous free tier), Dynatrace (AI-driven automatic root-cause analysis for large enterprises), Better Stack (monitoring paired with logs and incident response), and Prometheus + Grafana (the open-source standard for cloud-native metrics).

Originally published June 2024. Updated May 2026. A lot has changed since the first version of this guide. In May 2026, OpenTelemetry officially graduated within the CNCF, the highest maturity level a project can achieve. All three core signals (metrics, logs, and traces) are now stable across every major language SDK. Collector adoption has never been higher, and the ecosystem around it, particularly OpAMP for remote management, has matured significantly. This update walks through three things.

We’ve rolled out an update to the Monitor metrics view to improve both performance and visibility into response time trends for website and ping monitors.

Microsoft 365 plays a critical role in modern business communication and collaboration with services such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. However, many organizations overestimate Microsoft 365’s native protection and recoverability. In reality, Microsoft 365 operates under a shared responsibility model. While Microsoft ensures infrastructure availability and uptime, organizations are responsible for protecting and recovering their data.

Infrastructure cost visibility has become a critical part of IT decision-making. Performance still matters, but for many infrastructure leaders, that’s no longer the full conversation. Leadership teams increasingly want clarity around cost movement, upgrade exposure, underutilized resources, and whether infrastructure decisions are financially defensible. That creates a different requirement for operations teams: visibility that connects technical behavior to business impact.

We just wrapped O11yCon 2026, and this year's conversations hit differently. Agent-based software development is here, now. It's no longer an optional choice, and everybody is struggling to understand what their agents are doing and how to make them cost less and perform better. Over the course of fifteen talks, we saw clearly that the old assumptions on how and who (or what) writes our software has been upended. Here are some highlights. We'll have videos available in the near future.