Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Azure Functions monitoring guide: platform metrics by hosting plan, why executions go missing in Application Insights, OpenTelemetry setup and alerts. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

TL;DR Log and telemetry costs climb because every record gets shipped, indexed, and stored at the same priority. The fix starts before the backend: classify signals by operational value, filter what has none, and sample high-volume streams so you keep the evidence that matters and stop paying for the rest.

It’s 2:14 am, and checkout latency at your largest retail store has tripled. Your observability platform’s agent has already posted to Slack that there is a connection pool exhaustion on the orders database, with a link to the trace. Your cloud provider’s agent reports a degraded network path in one availability zone. The AI SRE tool one of your product teams adopted last spring points to a deploy that went out at 1:50.

On August 17, Gartner placed BigPanda in the Niche Players quadrant of the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Applications in IT Service Management (ITSM). It’s our first time on this MQ, after an honorable mention last year. I’m glad we’re there, and I want to explain why a company that doesn’t sell an ITSM platform reads that as a strong result.

Kubernetes workload rightsizing is one of those tasks everyone agrees is important and almost nobody enjoys doing by hand. Set requests too high and you pay for capacity that sits idle; set them too low and you invite CPU throttling, out-of-memory kills, and late-night pages. It’s no surprise, then, that many teams reach for the Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) as their first step toward automated rightsizing.

Uptime Institute's Global Data Center Survey 2026 found that the average modal rack density exceeded 11 kW in 2026, up from 9 kW in 2025. “Modal rack density” means the rack density that is most common within a data center. Arguably, the more important trend is that rack densities are becoming more varied, with more facilities supporting a mix of conventional and high-density racks.

CVE-2026-74580 is a high-severity Linux kernel bug in vhost, the subsystem that accelerates I/O for virtual machines. It gives a local user a reliable path to root on the host, and in some VM setups it lets a guest write into host memory. The CVE record has existed since August 21, 2026, but the full technical write-up, nicknamed "Vghost", only went public on October 12. It came with working exploit demos for both a local root escalation and a VM escape.

Active-active means two or more locations serve live traffic at the same time, with the application running in each and its data replicated across them, so no location sits idle waiting for a failover. You build it in five layers, and data is the hardest.

A production inference layer needs GPU compute sized to the model, a serving runtime such as vLLM or SGLang, orchestration that autoscales on queue depth, one endpoint with health-aware routing and failover, model weights cached near the GPUs, and observability, security, and cost controls.

Developers use Bitbucket Cloud every day to turn plans into working software. Code lives in repositories, feedback happens in pull requests, and Bitbucket Pipelines helps teams validate changes before they move forward. For an AI assistant to help with this work, it needs access to the same information. Without a direct connection, developers have to gather pull request details, pipeline results, logs, and links before the assistant can help.