Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When an issue in production triggers an alert, the people responding to it are often working in Slack while the evidence they need is elsewhere. Responders need to move between conversations, telemetry data, source code, and incident tooling as they form hypotheses, coordinate actions, and keep stakeholders informed. That context switching can slow down a time-sensitive investigation and make updates harder to follow.

You set a threshold alert on a checkout endpoint at 500ms. It pages you every Monday at 9am, when traffic doubles and nothing is actually wrong. You raise the threshold to 800ms to make the noise stop. Three weeks later a real regression creeps in at 650ms, and nobody gets paged, because you tuned the alert to survive Mondays instead of to catch problems.

For years, moving workloads to the cloud has been driven by scalability, flexibility and the desire to reduce the capital expenditure associated with running a data center. In 2026, however, there is another factor entering the conversation: the rising cost of buying and refreshing physical servers. The question is now whether rapidly increasing hardware prices are enough to push organizations that might previously have refreshed their on-premises infrastructure towards cloud alternatives.

Incident handling primer to help Google Cloud Platform customers design and practice reliability incident response and minimize business impact.

I don't remember the last time I actually searched for something. Not in the way I used to, anyway. There was a time when having a question meant opening a search engine, typing a few words, staring at a page full of links, opening three or four of them, reading contradictory answers, deciding which one sounded believable, and eventually coming to a conclusion of my own.