Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Selecting the right observability platform has become a strategic priority for enterprises operating at scale.

As organizations grow, they face increasing difficulty in managing their observability efforts. More teams mean more dashboards, monitors, API keys, pipelines, and custom configurations. Without a centralized view, administrators spend hours chasing down untagged resources, investigating surprise bills, and revoking dormant credentials. Governance becomes a reactive effort to reduce waste and address issues, falling short of its potential to proactively create standards and optimize observability.

This is a guest post from Laura Copeland. Key insights from a fireside chat with Chris Yates. Part 1. Choosing the right database monitoring vendor isn’t just a technical decision, it’s a strategic one that affects your teams, your estate, your growth plans, and the culture of your organisation. It’s also a personal one if you’re a DBA. Something as critical as your monitoring system will shape your day‑to‑day work, and, in many cases, how well you sleep at night.

I've been building a multi-agent research system. The idea is simple: give it a controversial technical topic like "Should we rewrite our Python backend in Rust?", and three agents work on it. An Advocate argues for it, a Skeptic argues against, and a Synthesizer reads both briefs blind and produces a balanced analysis. Each agent has its own model, its own tools, its own system prompt. It worked great in testing. Then I noticed the Synthesizer kept producing analyses that leaned heavily toward one side.

Traditionally, achieving deep visibility into distributed systems required significant trade-offs in engineering time. Collecting meaningful application metrics and traces required teams to embed language-specific agents, modify source code, or manage complex library dependencies across every service.

Last month, the VictoriaMetrics team gave a talk on retroactive sampling at KubeCon Europe 2026. By writing this blog post, as a transcript of the session, we want to explain how retroactive sampling reduces outbound traffic, CPU, and memory usage in the data collection pipeline significantly compared to tail sampling in OpenTelemetry.

Alert fatigue usually isn’t caused by one thing. It’s the accumulation of thresholds that are slightly too sensitive, alerts that fire during known maintenance windows, and historical patterns that nobody has the tools to review easily. Fixing it requires better visibility into how alerts actually behave over time, and a way to test changes before they hit production. We’ve shipped three improvements to alerting in Netdata that address different parts of this problem.