Report: AI Agents Increase Observability Costs

Cisco has released its Splunk State of Observability 2026 report, revealing that companies face growing costs and operational challenges as they deploy AI agents without sufficient monitoring capabilities. The report found that 57% of organizations spend more on telemetry, the data used to monitor IT systems, than on the infrastructure being monitored. Additionally, 55% of…

James Maguire Oct 23, 2026

Hackers Inject Credential-Stealer, RAT Into LiteLLM

Attackers compromised a version of LiteLLM this week by injecting malicious code into all seven of its published Python wheels on PyPI, delivering a package that included an infostealer to exfiltrate credentials and secrets and a remote access trojan (RAT) that could let bad actors run arbitrary code on infected machines. The compromised version –…

Jeff Burt Oct 23, 2026

Linux Foundation: AI Speeds Development, but Low-Quality Code Strains Maintainers

A new Linux Foundation study finds that generative AI is delivering big productivity gains for open source software developers, but AI is also creating an influx of low-quality code submissions that need time-consuming human review. The research found that an estimated 25% of incoming pull requests, which are proposed changes to software projects, are considered…

James Maguire Oct 22, 2026

Blogs

OpenAI Puts COBOL Migration to the Test, and Its Newest Models Mostly Pass

OpenAI’s latest coding benchmarks show substantial improvements in handling COBOL, Fortran and other low-resource languages. But for DevOps teams modernizing legacy applications, translating code is only half the challenge. The real test is preserving business logic, arithmetic precision and production behavior…

Tom Smith Oct 21, 2026

Survey: AI Coding Tools Increase Open Source Software Dependencies

A survey of 307 enterprise technology leaders finds that as organizations rely more on artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools to build applications, they are simultaneously increasing the amount of open source software they are dependent on. Conducted by the market research firm Moving Horizon on behalf of ActiveState, a provider of a platform for accessing…

Mike Vizard Oct 21, 2026

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DevOps.com Research

The State of Observability 2026: Bigger Budgets, Higher Stakes and the Rise of the Agent

Observability has crossed a threshold. What began as a set of tools for monitoring infrastructure has become a strategic investment that enterprise IT leaders now tie directly to their ability to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) safely. Budgets are climbing fast: a Futurum Group survey of 628 enterprise IT leaders reported by DevOps.com found 36% plan to spend more than $1 million on observability in 2026, with 7% planning to spend more than $5 million. At the same time, telemetry costs are rising faster than many teams can justify, tool sprawl remains stubborn, and AI agents are exposing the limits of the metrics, logs and traces model. This report draws on Futurum Group research, Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) spending-intention data, practitioner reporting from DevOps.com, Cloud Native Now and PlatformEngineering.com, and executive interviews and webinars from Techstrong TV and Techstrong Learning. Five findings stand out: spending is moving up-market; cost control is the central operational problem; no enterprise has a truly unified platform; AI observability has become a buying priority before agents are widely deployed; and platform engineering is becoming the delivery vehicle for observability.

Mike VizardUpdated October 23, 20269 min read

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