Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We just published the CertKit roadmap.

For many teams, 2024 was the year of asking, “can OpenTelemetry do this?” In 2025, the community answered with a resounding “yes,” moving beyond experimentation to focus on what matters most in practice: stability, ease of use, and cross-project compatibility. That momentum now sets the stage for what’s to come for OpenTelemetry in 2026.

A typical ITOps day is consumed by manual triage, fragmented context, and coordination work that expands with scale and slows every incident. Your day begins with alerts that arrived overnight. The symptoms are partial and the blast radius is unclear, so the first task is not remediation; it is figuring out what is real, what is related, and what matters. Next, a ticket comes in with a brief description and no evidence. Ownership is unclear.

Errors get a bad rap, but they’re just trying to help. Remember, errors aren’t the enemy, they’re the messenger. Conventional wisdom tells you to think of errors as failures, as things that thwart progress and frustrate developers. The reality is that errors are actually there to help you. They prevent you from shipping broken code to production. They stop your application from continuing to operate incorrectly and costing you money.

Logs are often the first place dev teams look when they investigate an issue. But logs are often added as an afterthought, and developers struggle with the balance of logging too much or too little. As a seasoned developer, you may remember a time when you were asked to investigate an issue and then handed a 200 MB plaintext log file. Three hours and four Python scripts later, you would realize that the problem was in a different component.