Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Last month, the VictoriaMetrics team gave a talk on retroactive sampling at KubeCon Europe 2026. By writing this blog post, as a transcript of the session, we want to explain how retroactive sampling reduces outbound traffic, CPU, and memory usage in the data collection pipeline significantly compared to tail sampling in OpenTelemetry.

Welcome to the March release roundup of VictoriaMetrics Stack, covering key enhancements in VictoriaMetrics and VictoriaLogs. These updates deliver improved UI scalability, enhanced authentication flexibility, improved query performance, and logging tools that streamline observability workflows in production environments. This roundup covers releases for.

Writing code is moving from the good old IDE into the realm of autonomous AI agents. One example of this is OpenAI, which has been developing internally with 0 lines of manually written code. You can read about their workflow in their engineering blog: Harness engineering: leveraging Codex in an agent-first world. For me, the main takeaway of OpenAI’s article is how AI has rewritten the constraints equation.

At VictoriaMetrics, we built vlagent as a high-performance log collector for VictoriaLogs. To validate its performance and correctness under a real production-like load, we developed a benchmark suite and ran it against 8 popular log collectors. This post covers the methodology, throughput results, resource usage, and delivery correctness. Collectors under the test: We’ve made all benchmark configurations and source code public, so you can reproduce and verify the results independently.

This month, we’re thrilled to see OpenAI using the VictoriaMetrics Stack internally — including VictoriaMetrics, VictoriaLogs, and VictoriaTraces — in their Harness engineering experiment, as shown in their architecture diagram. It’s a great way of combining observability and AI agents.

Last week, members of the VictoriaMetrics team, including myself, spoke at three very different but equally important community events: FOSDEM in Brussels, Cloud Native Days France in Paris, and CfgMgmtCamp in Ghent. Each event drew a different crowd with its own expectations, making them a good way to see where open source observability stands today and how VictoriaMetrics is adapting to real-world needs. The talks we gave were snapshots of the problems we are actively working on.

Yes, you got it right: VictoriaLogs is now Generally Available in VictoriaMetrics Cloud! We believe that this is a huge milestone in our journey to deliver what our users are expecting from us: a complete, managed observability solution. If you’ve been following our quarterly updates, you know we’ve been after this launch for a while. In our latest update a few weeks ago we already announced that we were ready and today we’re making it official.

It’s been a while since the last update on “What’s New” series, so I will try and keep it short yet informative. Stay tuned for upcoming content on anomaly detection.

This post covers ~80% of VictoriaLogs concepts and features people ask about most often. For deeper details and full references, see the official VictoriaLogs documentation. Part of a series.

2025 has been quite a year! As we enter into 2026, we want to share all the great features that VictoriaMetrics Cloud has brought in the last quarter. Remember that this Quarterly Live Update is available in video format as well here: Let’s get to it!