Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The IT landscape has evolved rapidly, transitioning from monolithic applications to complex, distributed system architectures comprising microservices that run on platforms like Kubernetes. With this added complexity, simply checking if a server is running is no longer sufficient. As IT professionals, we need insight into what’s really happening inside these systems. That’s where observability comes in.

Automation revealed truth. AI learned to reason from it. Now, systems are beginning to understand themselves. The self-aware enterprise isn’t a vision of autonomy. It’s a model of awareness. It sees, understands, and acts with precision based on verified knowledge of how it operates. This is the next evolution of intelligence in IT. Not artificial. Not imagined. Built.

2025 has been quite a year! As we enter into 2026, we want to share all the great features that VictoriaMetrics Cloud has brought in the last quarter. Remember that this Quarterly Live Update is available in video format as well here: Let’s get to it!

Managing assets across multiple business locations has become significantly more complex in recent years. As enterprises expand geographically, often operating across 10, 20, or even 50+ locations, the challenge of maintaining visibility, control, and accountability over assets increases exponentially. In 2026, asset tracking is no longer a “nice to have” capability for distributed enterprises; it is a foundational requirement for operational efficiency, compliance, and cost control.

Teams work on databases across multiple environments (e.g., Development, Test, QA/UAT, Production) and differences can happen in these databases over time. A hot fix applied directly to Production or a quick change applied in Test while troubleshooting are examples of how the schema can diverge from what’s expected. These differences are known as drift and can cause problems with deployments making them unpredictable and harder to troubleshoot.

First, I’d like to say how happy and lucky I feel to be working at Redgate on Flyway. I’m one of two Senior Product Managers in Flyway and we’ve been looking for a third to join us. We work alongside the Flyway Group Leadership Team (Group Product Manager, Architect, Lead Designer, and Development Manager) and four amazing engineering teams with embedded designers. We also work with the Product Support, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams.

In engineering, there's a concept known as the Iron Triangle. With three sides—cost, quality, time—it's a framework intended to help you prioritize different aspects of project management Want fast, high-quality features? It'll cost you. Need to keep costs down while maintaining quality? That'll take time. And if you're trying to move fast and cheap? Well, good luck with quality. For years, this has been the brutal reality of running services on the web.

Observability is the surprising budget line that isn’t shrinking. 96% of IT leaders expect observability budgets to hold steady or grow over the next 12 months. And 62% expect those budgets to increase regardless of broader IT budget cuts. Why? Because as infrastructure becomes more distributed and harder to manage, observability has shifted from a “nice to have” to a control point for cost, performance, and risk.

Executives today operate in a constant state of pressure. Regulatory demands grow faster than budgets, customers expect proof of resilience and every system outage becomes a business event. When each function manages risk in isolation, leaders spend more time reacting than advancing strategy. The real issue is coherence. Most organizations still rely on partial instruments: dashboards filled with red and amber, but no clarity on which risks matter or what an outage would actually cost.

Tier 1 ticket automation is one of the most tempting (and, to be brutally honest, most mishandled) initiatives in IT service management. On paper, it seems simple: automate the high-volume requests, reduce handle time, and give your service desk some breathing room. In practice, though, many teams end up with brittle scripts and automations that quietly drift outside ITSM guardrails.