Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Cardinality problems usually begin with a small change that looks harmless: you add a label, and suddenly one metric turns into thousands of unique series. Cardinality explosions are often caught only after performance degrades. And at that point, your observability stack may be degraded and painful to troubleshoot. vmestimator is a new project specifically designed to follow cardinality trends in real time and send you alerts before they turn into a real problem.

In the first half of 2026, we shipped a wide range of improvements across metrics, logs, traces, cloud, and the Kubernetes operator. Our main focus across open-source components and enterprise solutions was on performance, stability, and making observability easier to adopt and operate day‑to‑day. This roundup brings together the most important changes to date, including a quick look back at key anomaly detection improvements from 2025 that are now paying off today.

Many “LLM observability with OpenTelemetry” tutorials stop at a single chat.completions span. That works for a demo, but it leaves gaps once an agent fans out into 30 tool calls, two vector-DB queries, three handoffs, and a 90-second tail latency you need to attribute. This post wires the OpenLIT SDK (50+ instrumentations, OTel GenAI semantic conventions, one line of code) into the full VictoriaMetrics observability stack and shows query examples that turn agent telemetry into decisions.

If you run VictoriaLogs, your day-to-day comes down to three things: sending logs, querying them, and setting retention so the disk does not fill up. Everything else happens quietly on disk.

The VictoriaMetrics Observability Stack included two releases for VictoriaMetrics and a new LTS release for the VictoriaMetrics Operator in May. We’ve also published two detailed articles in the last few weeks: This release roundup covers updates for.

VictoriaMetrics Operator has been developing at a neck-breaking pace, bringing numerous improvements, features, and fixes to our community. We usually make at least a single release every two weeks. While this rapid iteration cycle is great for delivering fixes and improvements quickly, it can be challenging for administrators managing critical production environments.

We always knew that Airbnb’s engineering is operating on a completely different scale, and their new high-volume metrics pipeline is proof of that. This is one of those rare stories where scale and efficiency go hand in hand - they modernized their observability stack with open source components and reduced cost by an order of magnitude. Airbnb is now processing more than 100 million samples per second on a single production cluster.

Observability in large companies is rarely one-size-fits-all. The VictoriaMetrics topologies guide shows why different deployment patterns are needed as scale, isolation, and reliability requirements grow. Different workloads require different trade-offs: some need long retention for audits and trend analysis, while others need higher resolution for debugging. Business-critical systems also demand dependable alerting and high availability, often with several 9s of reliability.

We’re excited to learn that our vmagent helped Airbnb migrate its high-volume metrics pipeline from StatsD and Veneur to OpenTelemetry. Airbnb is now handling 100 million samples per second. You can read more about the migration in these articles: In other news, April saw releases across the VictoriaMetrics Observability Stack. We have released several important bugfixes for VictoriaMetrics and many new features in VictoriaLogs. This release round-up covers updates for.

Observability in software is often framed as a choice between self-hosted and SaaS: manage it yourself, or pay a vendor to handle your data. Both self-hosted and SaaS approaches have their merits, but assuming you must choose one exclusively over the other leads to poor trade-offs: either overcommitting to an all-in-one SaaS despite spiraling costs, or fully self-hosting when it’s unnecessary.