Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Picture this. You’re standing up a new service. Cursor or Claude Code wrote most of the controller, and it calls a payment API your team doesn’t own. Now you need tests. The agent is gamely inventing the response shape from whatever OpenAPI doc you fed it (which is a year stale), and the WireMock stubs it just generated are guesses dressed up as JSON. Three weeks later production breaks, the test suite was green the whole time, and nobody knows where to start looking.

Industrial teams keep telling us the same thing: the data is there, but the stack to act on it isn’t. PLCs, CNCs, SCADA systems, vibration sensors, and quality stations all generate high-frequency telemetry that gets stranded in proprietary historians or stitched together with point integrations nobody wants to own. By the time anyone looks at it, the moment to act has passed.

Open source thrives on engineering-driven processes. Fast feedback loops, terminal tools, Git workflows: they’re the lifeblood of how we build software in the open. But for software to truly excel, we need to create user experiences that empower people to use them. I wanted to bring this conversation into the spotlight as part of Canonical’s Open Design initiatives. What better way than at FOSS Backstage 2026 Berlin?

AppSignal now supports Render's Metrics Stream. Configure it once in your Render workspace and Render forwards OpenTelemetry metrics to the AppSignal Collector. From there, the metrics show up in your AppSignal app as host metrics and automated dashboards. You only have to set up the stream once per workspace.

Hybrid cloud has reshaped the way enterprises build, run, and troubleshoot digital services. Applications now stretch across on-premises infrastructure, cloud platforms, regional services, interconnects, and distributed dependencies that change constantly. Operational complexity has expanded with that footprint, yet many observability practices still reflect assumptions from an earlier era of simpler architectures and clearer boundaries. That gap shows up fast during an incident.

You’re in a board meeting. The CISO is presenting on AI risk. The CFO asks a simple question: “When that finance agent we deployed last quarter accessed a customer payment record, can we tell who authorized it, what policy permitted it, and produce the full audit trail?” The CISO looks at the head of the platform. The head of the platform looks at security. Nobody answers. If you can picture that meeting happening at your company, you’re not alone.

As AI coding assistants dramatically inflate PR counts, commit frequency, and lines of code, the limitations of individual output metrics have never been more apparent. A developer can now produce significantly more lines per session, but higher volume doesn’t guarantee that the code is stable, maintainable, or successfully running in production. GitClear analyzed over 200 million lines of code and found that code churn nearly doubled following widespread AI adoption.

CIOs are under pressure from every direction. Budgets remain tight, geopolitical uncertainty is forcing organizations to rethink resilience, and workforce expectations continue to evolve. At the same time, AI is accelerating a broader shift across enterprise IT – changing not only how organizations operate, but also the skills and roles they will increasingly depend on. The question is not whether AI will reshape IT teams, but how quickly organizations can adapt to these new ways of working.