Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We just wrapped O11yCon 2026, and this year's conversations hit differently. Agent-based software development is here, now. It's no longer an optional choice, and everybody is struggling to understand what their agents are doing and how to make them cost less and perform better. Over the course of fifteen talks, we saw clearly that the old assumptions on how and who (or what) writes our software has been upended. Here are some highlights. We'll have videos available in the near future.

Las Vegas, May 2026 — Almaden took part in the 2026 edition of HDI Service & Support World, held May 3–7 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. From Booth 109, the company had a clear mission: to show how Collective IQ, its Digital Employee Experience (DEX) platform, amplifies the value of IT service management without added complexity, disruption, or wasted time. Visitors to the booth had the opportunity to speak directly with experts, Dave Wagner and Bob Kruger (Chief Product Officer).

‍Summary: Google Cloud Next ’26 focused on the future of software delivery, emphasizing that AI, platform consolidation, and an urgent push toward efficiency are reshaping the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The key takeaway from the event was that organizations are moving from AI experimentation to operationalization, actively consolidating fragmented tools onto end-to-end platforms that embed AI for control, intelligence, and speed. ‍

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam brought together about 13,500 attendees this year, the largest turnout yet. The size of the event showed just how much the cloud-native space has grown, and how central observability, platform engineering, and cost control have become. For VictoriaMetrics, this year’s event was a mix of talks, booth conversations, and a lot of direct feedback from users.

GrafanaCON 2026 kicked off in Barcelona, which is a fitting city to reveal the latest updates in Grafana 13. In 2013, Grafana Labs Co-founder Torkel Ödegaard made the first commit for what would become Grafana while he was on vacation in the Catalan city. "I was traveling here for the Christmas holiday and I got a cold and spent most of the day in bed coding and working on Grafana," said Torkel during the opening keynote of GrafanaCON, our biggest community event of the year.

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.

HIMSS 2026 made something clear: healthcare is no longer discussing digital transformation as a future-state goal. It is now dealing with the operational reality of having already become deeply digital. Conversations around HIMSS 2026 consistently pointed back to the same pressure points: AI adoption, cyber resilience, interoperability, and infrastructure modernization. Together, they reflect a healthcare environment managing more systems, more dependencies, and more risk than ever before.