Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This post introduces a six-level maturity model that defines what true autonomy looks like in IT operations, from basic AI chat interfaces to fully coordinated agent ecosystems. ITOps teams have more automation tooling than ever, and yet incident response still depends heavily on human judgment to hold it together. Alerts fire, engineers dig through dashboards, context gets assembled by hand, and someone at the end of the workflow makes the final call.

Rails applications have a specific set of performance challenges that make monitoring genuinely useful rather than just box-checking. ActiveRecord is convenient to use and also convenient to accidentally write N+1 queries with. Memory bloat in long-running processes, particularly when Sidekiq or Action Cable is involved, is a recurring production problem for a lot of teams. Background job performance tends to degrade quietly until it becomes noticeable.

In March 2026, CloudZero’s Ben Austin, Director of Product Marketing, sat down with Ray Rike, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, to walk through findings from FinOps in the AI Era: A Critical Recalibration, a joint survey of nearly 500 organizational leaders on how they’re managing or, rather, struggling to manage AI costs.

Oh Dear has always been a desktop-first tool. If you checked your monitors on your phone, you'd get the full desktop layout squeezed into a tiny screen, with lots of horizontal scrolling and tiny tap targets. That's fixed now. Every page in the app works on mobile.

SQL Prompt's February releases focused on compatibility and stability, with a critical fix for SSMS 22.3 users and several features graduating from experimental to fully supported.

In microservices and cloud-native environments, vulnerabilities buried in transitive dependencies or runtime behaviors can go undetected for weeks. During that time, your attack surface keeps expanding and production systems remain exposed. The longer remediation is delayed, the greater the risk of exploitation, compliance failures, and operational disruption.

Increasingly, enterprises are interested in improving their level of control over their data, achieving digital sovereignty, and even building their own sovereign cloud. However, this means moving beyond thinking about just where your data is stored to thinking about the entire data lifecycle. In this blog, we cover the differences between data residency and data sovereignty, how confidential computing works to enhance the security of your data, and can support you in achieving digital sovereignty.

Setting up an escalation policy for the first time can feel like standing at a crossroads with no clear sign pointing the way. You could escalate based on severity, by team, or by who’s available and all of them are valid. Knowing which one fits your situation is the hard part. Think of this guide as your compass for that decision.

Low-priority incidents are easy to deprioritise in the moment. Each one feels small and manageable. But without a proper escalation policy, they pile up quietly and reviewing them later often tells a different story. A simple escalation policy is usually all it takes to keep them from slipping through entirely.

When a critical incident triggers, there’s no time to figure out who to call. That decision needs to be made well before the incident arrives. A dedicated escalation policy for critical incidents gives your team a clear path to follow the moment things go wrong, rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be around. This guide covers the key decisions involved in building that policy.