Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Artificial intelligence has been a defining theme in IT operations for nearly a decade. Early AIOps initiatives focused on predictive analytics and anomaly detection, promising to reduce operational overhead and improve system reliability. While these capabilities delivered incremental value, they often fell short of transforming how operations actually functioned.

For more than two decades, monitoring has been the foundation of IT operations. Organizations invested heavily in tools designed to collect metrics, visualize performance, and trigger alerts when thresholds were breached. This model was effective in an era when infrastructure was largely static, workloads were predictable, and system dependencies were relatively easy to trace. That environment no longer exists.

Here’s a question that sounds simple but isn’t: When something breaks in your environment, how long does it take your team to agree on what they’re looking at? Not how long it takes to fix it—that’s a different problem. I mean: how long does it take for everyone on the bridge to have the same basic understanding of what’s broken, where it started, and what it’s affecting?

The 2025 Gartner Market Guide for Event Intelligence Solutions reflects a shift in how IT operations leaders evaluate AI-driven technologies. As AI hype gives way to more practical evaluation, we are seeing a natural departure from broad promises about AI capabilities toward clearly defined use cases and outcomes.

For much of the past decade, many of the most ambitious ideas in artificial intelligence lived primarily in research papers, labs, and long-term roadmaps. Agentic AI was no exception. The concept of AI systems capable of reasoning, planning, and acting autonomously was widely discussed but largely theoretical. But earlier this month, Gartner released its report The Future of NetOps Is Agentic, reflecting a growing consensus that this has changed. What was once conceptual is now becoming operational.

Metrics, analytics, measurements, and parameters – can we truly see these abstractions? Data visualization helps us do just that, bridging the gap between raw information and human comprehension. Visualizing data is like rafting down a river – dynamic, unpredictable, and full of discoveries along the way. In this guide, we’ll explore how to craft visualizations that inform, engage, and inspire. So, grab your paddle and hop aboard!

Yesterday’s widespread Cloudflare outage reminds us how crucial external dependencies are to the stability of our own applications. When a key edge provider like Cloudflare goes down, the impact on your internal monitoring systems can look like a catastrophic, internal system failure triggering a massive storm of alerts and sending engineering teams into frantic, misdirected debugging sessions.

AI in network operations is evolving faster than ever. But while new models and agents are emerging almost daily, they’re often working alone, with each confined to its own context, data, and domain. One model might analyze telemetry, another handles automation scripts, and a third generates summaries or recommendations. Each model might be intelligent on its own, but without a way to share context, they end up thinking in isolation, limiting what they can achieve together.

Over the last couple of years, nearly every network and infrastructure observability platform has added the word “AI” to its messaging. Some have introduced helpful capabilities. Others have simply added a chatbot on top of the same dashboards that have existed for a decade. In many ways, the term has started to lose meaning. But inside network operations, the conversation hasn’t disappeared. It has simply become more blunt.