Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’ve ever stared at your observability bill and whispered “there’s no way this is real,” congratulations! Your instincts are working.

If you have worked with observability tools in the last decade, you have likely managed, and been burnt by, a fragmented collection of tools and libraries. Each observability signal required its own tool, data formats were incompatible and had little or no correlation. For example, log records would not link to traces, meaning you had to guess which traces led to which events. The OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) solves this by decoupling how telemetry is generated from where it is analyzed.

In modern times where digital presence dictates business success, understanding website monitoring is no longer optional, whether you run an e-commerce store, SaaS platform, or enterprise website it’s a fundamental pillar of modern operations. Even a few minutes of website downtime can result in lost revenue, damaged credibility, and frustrated users.

After a decade of dashboards, alerts, and ever-expanding telemetry pipelines, observability is changing. No longer just the domain of engineering, the most innovative organizations are extending observability to all areas of the business to better understand system behavior, emerging risks, and customer impact. At the same time, rising cloud costs and increasing complexity are forcing organizations to be more intentional about what they observe and why.

Developers and SREs who rely on GitLab to develop their services often face significant friction when troubleshooting errors or fixing issues that degrade code quality. To understand the context of a problem, they resort to tab-hopping between observability tools and GitLab, connecting stack traces, spans, and profiles back to the right files and commits.

Microsoft Office 365 underpins daily work for millions of organizations. Email, collaboration, document sharing, identity, and meetings all converge into a single dependency that employees implicitly assume will “just work.” When it doesn’t, productivity halts immediately and visibly. Microsoft publishes service health dashboards and backs Office 365 with formal SLAs. On paper, availability is measured, tracked, and contractually enforced.

We're kicking off 2026 by shipping improvements that make DNS troubleshooting faster and more intuitive. When a DNS check fails, you'll now see exactly what needs to change to fix it, and you'll have complete visibility into your DNS record behavior over time.