Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Most CSP assurance roadmaps now carry an AI line item. Fewer have a clear answer for what that AI actually runs on. Over the past year, the working question across operators and vendors has narrowed to something practical: how to put agents to work in assurance while keeping operators in control.

Most MSPs are already experimenting with AI in some form, and every vendor at every conference has an AI for MSPs pitch ready. Few have stopped to check whether their own operations are solid enough to scale. Our 2026 IT Trends Report found that three-quarters of IT leaders believe they have an AI policy, while fewer than half of help desk staff agree. That’s the real risk: AI doesn’t fix drift, unclear ownership, or gaps between what’s documented and what’s actually happening.

Microsoft’s Azure Functions serverless compute service abstracts away infrastructure management to simplify how teams deploy and operate applications. However, the managed environment can make it harder to understand what happens inside those applications after deployment. Traditional approaches that rely on agents, extensions, and sidecars for direct collection of telemetry data aren’t available across every Azure Functions hosting plan, which can leave gaps in end-to-end visibility.

Resilience Testing (RT) Agents scan your CD pipelines and Kubernetes workloads for resilience risk before it reaches production, then generate and run the chaos experiments or load tests needed to confirm it.

IT Ops teams face two failures that pull in opposite directions: responders interrupted so often that they stop reacting, and a truly critical alert lost inside that same flood. Alert noise and alert fatigue describe those two problems, and treating them as one usually makes both worse. This article shows how to reduce interruptions without making critical incidents easier to miss.

The AI red teaming market grew up fast this year. OpenAI bought Promptfoo, Cisco and Microsoft shipped automated attack suites, and a seed-stage startup publicly compromised 50 of 55 live customer service bots. These platforms find real problems at a scale no human team can match. But when you read the findings closely, a pattern emerges: agents talked into refunds, transfers, and data leaks they had standing authority to perform. Patching the prompt fixes one phrasing until the next model update.

A backup is only useful if the data is still there when something goes wrong — and if it can be restored quickly enough to matter. As backup volumes grow, teams need more capacity without losing control of recovery performance or cost. S3-compatible backup storage gives teams another way to handle that pressure. It uses the familiar Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) API model without requiring backup data to live in Amazon S3 itself.

Application migrations stall for a predictable reason: the demanding part is rarely the application code itself. It is the infrastructure around it: the deployment logic, pipeline, and environment configuration that has to be rebuilt. That surrounding work is what turns a migration into a multi-month project, and it is why teams stay on infrastructure that no longer serves them. Upsun Cloud reduces migration to a much smaller task.

If you run your service desk on ConnectWise PSA, it's already the system of record for almost everything that matters. Tickets, agreements, configurations, projects, time entries, it's all in there. What it doesn't give you is an easy way to put that data next to the rest of your stack, your RMM, your security tooling, your backup platform, so you can look at a client and see the whole picture rather than one system at a time.

Summary: Jean-Jérôme Schmidt-Soisson, marketing lead at VictoriaMetrics, shows that open source and marketing are not opposites. Open source itself can be a powerful growth engine through trust, community, content, documentation, and discoverability. The article explains VictoriaMetrics’ pull-based marketing strategy, anchored in open-source values, to support adoption and business growth. This is our second article on the relationship between open source and marketing.