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From an IT pro’s perspective, the future of networking technology in 2026 is a mixed bag of potential and security risk. New wireless tech, agentic AI, and the increased distribution of networks are enabling new use cases and helping automate toil, but they also create new attack surfaces and risk profiles. In this article, we’ll take a look at the ten network security trends we’re most excited about in 2026 and provide key insights about what each one means for IT and MSP teams.

This article explains how to integrate metrics from Prometheus into Icinga checks using the check_prometheus plugin. There can be multiple reasons why this could be desired: Maybe you have different teams with their own monitoring systems, and you need to bridge the gap, or you want to perform queries that are just better expressed in Prometheus than in plain Icinga check plugins. The latter can be the case if you want to aggregate data from multiple sources or you want to take historic data into account.

In the previous post, we looked at what happens after detection; when incidents stop being purely technical problems and become human ones, with cognitive load as the real constraint. This post assumes that context. The question here is simpler and more practical. What actually helps teams think clearly and act well once things are already going wrong? One answer, used quietly but consistently by high-performing teams, is the checklist.

Your domain is more than a URL- it’s the control plane for how people (and machines) reach your website, apps, and inbox. When something breaks at the domain layer, the symptoms look “random” (site intermittently down, emails bouncing, logins failing), but the root cause is often predictable: misconfigurations, weak authentication, or degraded DNS performance. A domain health check is the fastest way to surface those issues before customers do.

There is a satisfaction in building things yourself. It is the same psychological hook that powers the endless stream of DIY renovation videos on your social media feeds. You watch a sixty-second clip of someone transforming a pile of lumber into a custom coffee table, and it looks ingenious, cost-effective, and uniquely tailored to their needs. It triggers a powerful "why buy when I can build?" mindset.

Want your log queries to be more precise? Is your vibe code flooding you with logs and need a helping hand to make sense of it all? Good news! We've upgraded our log query language to be more powerful, flexible, and intuitive, letting you focus on finding answers fast rather than endlessly scrolling through your logs. And that's not all: We've revamped our logging interface, making it easier than ever to manage logs, customize views, and leverage log attributes.

Think of a stateful application like a conversation with a barista who remembers your order every time you walk in. They know what you had yesterday, how you like it prepared, and what you’ll probably want next. That memory makes the experience smoother, but it also means that if that barista isn’t around, your experience can break down entirely. A stateless application, on the other hand, is similar to ordering from a self-service kiosk.

If you’ve ever watched a pull request sit for hours because of a flaky test, you know how quickly test suites can turn from safety net into bottleneck. As teams grow, test suites tend to grow even faster because every new feature, bug fix, and regression adds more tests, while old or redundant tests are rarely cleaned up, so over time you end up running far more tests than are strictly needed for reliable feedback.

In the world of cloud-native infrastructure, complexity is the silent killer of innovation. For Cisco Outshift, the company’s incubation engine, managing a sprawling environment of AWS EKS clusters and edge-based MicroK8s workloads created a classic bottleneck: the Platform Engineering team was drowning in toil. Facing SRE burnout and the limits of human scaling, Cisco embarked on an ambitious journey to evolve its internal operations from standard DevOps to Agentic AI.

The way we work has fundamentally changed. Remote and hybrid work aren't temporary shifts; they're the new reality for most organizations. And with that reality comes a challenge IT teams know all too well: how do you troubleshoot network issues for users you can't physically reach?