Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Matrix hits different.. when you're in the Matrix. The team rings in 2026 by reflecting on past predictions—and charting what’s next. From eerily accurate calls on AI consolidation to the unsettling prescience of The Matrix, the conversation looks ahead to a pivotal shift: from conversational AI to operational “do-bots,” the challenge of measuring real enterprise value, and the growing risks of over-automation.

Modern tools mean nothing if your culture still rewards presence over outcomes. Real transformation starts with how you lead.

SolarWinds TechPod returns with its annual IT trends and predictions episode — and 2026 is all about Agentic AI. In this episode of SolarWinds TechPod, hosts Sean Sebring and Chrystal Taylor are joined by Sascha Giese (SolarWinds) and Lauren Okruch (SolarWinds Product Marketing) to break down how AI, ITSM, automation, governance, and resilience will shape IT operations in 2026.

Stack traces tell you what broke. They rarely tell you why. In this video, Serge walks through a real Next.js production bug that only affected Firefox and Safari. The error showed up clearly in Sentry, but the stack trace alone wasn’t enough to explain what was going wrong. The missing piece turned out to be logs. You’ll see how adding logs to a Next.js API route exposed unexpected request data, how those logs connected back to traces, and how that context made the root cause obvious and easy to fix.

Balancing performance and cost in Kubernetes doesn’t have to be a tradeoff. In this short demo, you’ll see how Datadog helps teams rightsize workloads, reduce over-provisioning, and measure real cost savings using Kubernetes autoscaling.

In this video, discover how Canonical and Rightware are revolutionizing the automotive software development lifecycle. This demo showcases an automated workflow that deploys Anbox Cloud, spins up an Android Automotive image, and launches a Rightware Kanzi-powered UI that can be streamed at a stunning 8K resolution. By shifting infotainment testing to a cloud-native environment, automotive teams can accelerate iteration, enhance collaboration, and ensure high-performance user interfaces before they ever hit the physical hardware.