Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and share ways to stay ahead. This week, we’re exploring ways to consume information mindfully and avoid overstimulation. Today's internet user consumes content all the time. They listen to podcasts when they commute, watch YouTube when they do household chores, and listen to music when they work. The amount of content they consume is enormous, and the amount of content available is endless.

In the world of IT Asset Management (ITAM) and Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Management, staying ahead of system issues is a constant battle. IT teams are often flooded with data but starved for time, reacting to problems after they’ve already disrupted an employee’s workday.

Last updated: Oct. 15, 2026 IT environments change constantly. The challenge is making those changes without creating unnecessary risk, outages, or delays. IT change management, called Change Enablement in ITIL 4, helps teams assess, authorize, implement, validate, and learn from changes that could affect an IT service. The goal is not to slow delivery. It is to improve change success while reducing disruption, recovery time, compliance risk, and impact on critical business services.

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.