Monitoring & Observability in 2026 predictions
Monitoring & Observability in 2026
Another Christmas and New Year holiday has been had, and we have a new date to remember to type on our documents. Yes, 2026 is here, and these are my personal thoughts on what I foresee over the course of this year.
AI – Yes I had to start here
2025 was the year that AI took over everything in IT, where all the exhibitions and events I attended, if you did not have AI in your product, did the attendees dismiss you as being irrelevant? Not completely, but it certainly seemed that is how the vendors feel.
I’m not going to dwell on the hype cycle or speculate on whether the AI “bubble” is close to bursting. From my discussions with customers and partners, one thing is clear: there is still significant ground to cover before AI consistently delivers the value currently being marketed.
That said, as someone who has worked in IT monitoring for over 25 years, the speed at which AI is already delivering tangible benefit is remarkable and accelerating fast. We are moving from an era of “here is a wall of charts and metrics, go interpret them” to true observability, where AI actively cuts through noise, correlates signals, and presents insight rather than raw data. AI’s greatest strength is its ability to process and interpret vast quantities of structured data, precisely the foundation of any serious monitoring platform, making observability one of AI’s most natural and powerful use cases.
Currently the focus has been on the AI being used for the reactive functionality, which for the majority of organisations is the focused requirement of the solution/s, the movement to more predictive is only going to get better. With that additional AI delivered analysis organisations will be able to improve their uptime and performance metrics by fixing issues before they manifest into service affecting.
Another area I find fascinating is we are being asked more and more to monitor the quality of AI solutions, where an organisation needs to be able to monitor the usage, effectiveness and accuracy of AI capabilities being deployed across their business. This can be achieved of course, by monitoring/observability platforms, which in turn use their internal AI capabilities too.
Tooling Integration & Automation
AI today primarily augments human operations, but 2026 may well be the year when it becomes sufficiently capable and trusted to enable far higher levels of automated response.
Speaking of which, we have been pushing our clients to integrate and automate through the ITSM and ITOM tooling for a long time now. Our Youtube channel has a number of videos and webinars on this subject and I see more capabilities being driven by this. The combination of process automation and AI is extraordinarily powerful, and adoption is moving from experimental to production-grade. Attend our n8n launch webinar on the 22nd of January to see more on this.
The nirvana position of your monitoring capabilities is for an issue to be detected, the issue analysed, a solution determined, a solution to be generated and then applied. The human involvement in this can be validating the solution before applying or simply to perform a post-incident review, which AI can also provide.
Whilst vendors such as SolarWinds keep adding features to tie their solutions together, the vast majority of organisations do not standardise on a single vendor for their monitoring, service management and alerting platforms, but this should not be a barrier to building this into your disparate tooling. They can work with each other and you should be looking at making them.
OpenTelemetry Wider Adoption
What else has been happening in our IT segment; well OpenTelemetry (OTel) has been gaining more and more attention, with more vendors adding this protocol to their tech stack. OTel has quickly taken on the role of the de facto standard for telemetry data, allowing Metrics, Logs & Traces (MELT – yes another acronym in IT) to be consistent across the vendors.
Standards are essential for sustainable IT ecosystems, and OpenTelemetry is now firmly on that path.
However, there is an important consequence: telemetry volume is exploding.
Moving from pull-based data collection (API, SNMP) to push-based telemetry significantly increases data ingestion. While bandwidth is rarely the bottleneck, data storage and processing costs, particularly in cloud environments most certainly are.
Organisations adopting modern observability must therefore design with data economics firmly in mind.
A summary of 2026
- Observability deepens its analytical foundation
- Predictive operations become mainstream
- OpenTelemetry adoption accelerates
- Observability expands across roles and workloads
- Full-stack visibility delivered through fewer, smarter platforms
- AI and data-centric observability become the operational core
If 2026 is the year you want to move from reactive IT to predictive operations, now is the time to act.
Speak with Prosperon about how modern observability, AI-driven insight, and automation can transform your IT operations — from improved uptime and performance to reduced cost and operational risk.
Don’t forget – Join our upcoming n8n Launch Webinar on the 22nd of January and discover how we are helping organisations integrate monitoring, ITSM and automation into a single, intelligent operations platform