Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Top Tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we’ll be talking about how we can improve our retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems using contextual engineering. Prompt engineering has gained a lot of attention in the past year, and it’s finally time to move on to a better experience that transforms the way AI results are provided to us.

As IT organizations enter 2026, many of the assumptions around monitoring and observability have already been tested. Throughout 2025, infrastructure teams made it clear that visibility alone is not enough. Alerts without context, short data retention, and fragmented tools limited teams’ ability to explain behavior, validate changes, and plan with confidence. This article looks at what emerged from those experiences and how observability expectations continue to shift.

Why strong reviews, accountability, and monitoring matter more in an AI-assisted world Artificial intelligence has become the latest fault line in software development. For some teams, it’s an obvious productivity multiplier. For others, it’s viewed with suspicion. A source of low-quality code, unreviewable pull requests, and latent production risk. One concern we hear frequently goes something like this: It’s an understandable fear; and also the wrong conclusion.

There’s a moment every engineer knows. An AI suggests a fix, it looks reasonable,maybe even obvious, but production is on the line and you hesitate before clicking execute. There’s a big difference between an AI that can recommend an action and one you’re willing to let take that action. All it takes is one bad call, one kubectl command that makes things worse, and suddenly every automated suggestion is a potential liability instead of a help.

Have you ever asked yourself, what is the fastest way to turn a harmless Infrastructure as Code change into a production incident and an awkward postmortem? We did, and found that usually, it's from letting it through without any guardrails. Infrastructure guardrails in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) were once a nice-to-have. Today, they’re essential. Without clear boundaries and safety mechanisms, even well-designed IaC workflows can turn small mistakes into fast-moving, high-impact problems.

We just released the Sentry SDK for Unity 4.0.0 , our biggest update yet. This major release brings comprehensive gaming console support, structured logging, user feedback capabilities, and significant improvements to help you build better games across all platforms. Here's what's new.

Security teams are increasingly turning to Amazon Security Lake to consolidate security telemetry across cloud, network, and on-prem environments. Security Lake provides a unified, OCSF-based data repository that powers analytics, threat hunting, and machine learning across AWS services and third-party tools. But to take advantage of Security Lake’s capabilities, organizations must deliver clean, normalized, OCSF-compliant data, and this is where challenges arise.

Pragya Jazwal, Platform Engineering Lead at Paxos, compared standing up an internal developer portal to buying a gym membership during her talk at IDPCON 2025. Purchasing the software is one thing, but convincing a team of busy engineers to change their daily habits is a much bigger monster to tame. Pragya says the platform team at Paxos learned this lesson the hard way.

Generic AI fails in network operations because it lacks the “institutional knowledge” of your specific environment and business priorities. Learn how Kentik’s Custom Network Context encodes your unique operational reality into AI Advisor, turning a generic chatbot into a context-aware teammate.

This post covers how to get started with Home Assistant and Grafana, including setting up InfluxDB and Grafana with Docker, configuring InfluxDB to receive data from Home Assistant, and creating a Grafana dashboard to visualize your data. It provides a comprehensive guide for real-time monitoring and analysis of Home Assistant data. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to integrate Grafana with Home Assistant using InfluxDB.