Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Hashicorp's co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto decided to pull out his Ghostty project from GitHub in April 2026 due to GitHub's reliability issues. He did this after 18 years of using GitHub, saying that GitHub "is no longer a place for serious work". GitHub has experienced a significant decline in reliability over the past 6 months, and Hashimoto is not alone in expressing this sentiment.

This is what production teams see happening. A vertical pod autoscaler recommendation gets applied automatically. Resource requests come down a notch across a namespace. The cost dashboard registers a small cost savings win. A few minutes later, health checks start failing. Pods enter crash loops.

The first two weeks of Claude Code are exciting. The third week is when you realize you don’t have visibility into what it’s doing or what it’s costing you. You would not run a production service without metrics, logs, and dashboards or deploy an API without knowing its latency, error rate, or cost per request.

ChatGPT costs $0 to $200+/month depending on the plan. Compare Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise pricing, plus API costs and what GPT-5.5 changes.

We recently brought together IT operations leaders from across financial services, healthcare, airlines, media, and other industries for BigPanda 26, our annual customer event. The theme that emerged above all others during the event’s conversations is that our industry is no longer debating whether AI belongs in ITOps. The debate now is about how quickly it can be implemented, how to measure it, and who’s accountable when it acts. Here are some key learnings from BigPanda 26.

The promise of AI in IT service management has been circulating for years. Chatbots that deflect tickets. Virtual agents that answer FAQs. Automation that routes requests. These are useful, but probably not the dream-state you were originally sold. What's different today is the arrival of agentic AI: systems that don't just respond to instructions but reason, act, and adapt across multi-step workflows with real consequences. The question for IT leaders is no longer whether to adopt agentic ITSM.

Last year, at the annual conference for an open source framework you've definitely heard of, I walked up to the founder in a room outside the main stage. He was hunched over his laptop, frantic. We've known each other for a few years. "What's going on? Is everything okay?" He looked up with the specific shade of white people only get when they realize they've made a big mistake.

Context engineering is the practice of managing the information an AI model sees (documents, tool outputs, memory, and structured metadata about the systems it reasons over) so it can make accurate decisions inside a real engineering organization. Most engineering teams have access to the same AI coding agents: Claude, GPT, Gemini, the major variants everyone is shipping. The model is no longer the differentiator.

I recently gave a talk at Experts Live India 2026 about SquaredUp, and even before getting into the demo, there was one question I knew I had to address: Is the dashboard era over? It's something we're all hearing more. "Just ask AI." "Agentic AI will build your dashboards automatically." "Why bother with static views when a chatbot can answer anything?" It's a fair question. Answering it requires a clear understanding of what a dashboard represents.

Quick Answer A Network Operations Center (NOC) — pronounced “knock” — is a centralized physical or virtual facility where IT professionals monitor, manage, and maintain an organization’s network infrastructure on a 24/7/365 basis. The NOC serves as the nerve center for detecting incidents, coordinating responses, and ensuring maximum network availability and performance.