Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

ServiceNow is the system of record for change and approvals in most regulated enterprises. And yet, for many teams, it has become the place where delivery slows to a crawl. Not because ServiceNow is broken. But because the evidence model underneath it is. Developers ship fast through modern CI/CD pipelines, automated tests, and security scans, only to hit a wall when changes reach approval. Tickets bounce back. Evidence is questioned. Screenshots do not tell the full story. CABs hesitate. Releases wait.

CIOs rarely struggle to find automation ideas. What they struggle with is getting those ideas funded, then keeping support once the first few workflows go live. We built this guide for IT leaders who need a credible, repeatable way to present IT automation ROI in language that resonates with the C suite. If you are shaping an automation program across service desk, IT operations, and network operations, our Agentic Automation for CIOs & CTO’s hub lays out the strategic lens.

Gartner has predicted that 2026 will see a 10.6% increase in India’s total IT spend from 2025 (2025: USD 159 billion vs 2026: USD 176.3 billion), with data centres, cloud infrastructure, and AI-enabled technologies driving this growth. This isn’t just a budget increase; it’s a fundamental shift in where innovation happens, who owns the infrastructure, and how we translate AI potential into scalable impact.

Anyone who has ever attempted to learn the guitar knows the lure of buying high-end gear. Surely, an expensive guitar and a best-in-class amplifier will hide the fact that you only know a few chords and maybe the lead line to that one song you keep hearing on the radio. What most players find out, however, is that spending thousands of dollars on gear doesn't change the fact that you're not that good yet.

For many years, uptime and availability have been basic standard measures of server health monitoring. But if a server is up and responding to a ping or HTTP request, does that really mean that all is well? In reality, uptime and availability alone often provide a false sense of security. A server can be technically “up” while being seconds away from a crash, running out of memory, operating with an expired license, or silently failing critical updates.

I’d like to share a new influxctl ease-of-use feature in v2.12.0 that makes it easier to optimize important queries or debug slow ones. influxctl has had the capability to send queries and display the results in JSON or tabular formats for some time.

With all we’ve seen from AI in the last several years, it can be easy to forget that it’s still in its very early days. As torrid as its evolution has been thus far, it will only intensify. As SVP of Engineering at a B2B SaaS company, I’ve had a front-row seat for much of this evolution. Here are three ways I see AI heading in 2026.

AI that understands human insight and connects it to the changes that drive real incidents. At Harness, our story has always been about change — helping teams ship faster, deploy safer, and control the blast radius of every modification to production. Deployments, feature flags, pipelines, and governance are all expressions of how organizations evolve their software. Today, the pace of change is accelerating.

It’s no secret that all software and more broadly, any technology that doesn’t move atoms is ripe for disruption by the current and future capabilities of large language models. Any workflow, application, or digital process that can be expressed in code can be redesigned, improved, and transformed at speed and scale. AI-first companies will outpace legacy players by orders of magnitude, and many workflow-based models with humans in the loop will be fundamentally reshaped.