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2026 Observability Predictions - Part 4

In APMdigest's 2026 Observability Predictions Series, industry experts — from analysts and consultants to the top vendors — offer predictions on how Observability and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2026. Part 4 covers user experience, digital performance, website performance and ITSM.

USER-FOCUSED OBSERVABILITY

Business leaders will start to realize that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the realm of mobile and web observability. Crash reporting and RUM tell you what's happening on mobile and web apps, but on their own, they do little to quantify the impact to user behavior when app performance and quality regresses or improves. The ability to link mobile observability data to what is more traditionally seen as product analytics (i.e., data that models user intention and outcomes) will unlock a new use-case — User-Focused Observability — whereby changes to user behavior can be linked to changes in app performance and vice versa, finally answering the question: what is this app perf problem costing my business in terms of revenue, DAU, and other KPIs?
Hanson Ho
Android Architect, Embrace

DIGITAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Digital performance management (DPM) is evolving to become an IT discipline, and it will be put into serious practice in 2026 and beyond. DPM works by correlating technical service metrics with extended SLAs, measuring real user and employee experiences. Integrations across application performance management, end-use experience management, and network monitoring with AI-enabled business intelligence will help large IT teams with a scattered global workforce identify performance bottlenecks ahead of the curve, ensuring business goals are not hampered by poor performance such as shopping cart abandonment. DPM will also involve automations to guard mission-critical revenue-generating services first.
Srinivasa Raghavan Santhanam
Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

ANALYST REPORT: 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Monitoring

REMOTE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

In the coming years, end-user experience management (EUEM) will be considered a strategic business priority, largely due to how our workforces, workplaces, and workloads have changed in the era of hybrid work. Practices like correlating deep client-side monitoring with qualitative sentiment data, like relating user surveys with help desk tickets using AI, will help identify gaps to fix digital friction points. A holistic grasp of how your products are actually received at the last mile, enabled by EUEM, will enhance employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention.
Srinivasa Raghavan Santhanam
Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

Remote and hybrid workforces will continue to expose blind spots in application performance and network visibility. In 2026, enterprises will invest heavily in endpoint-to-cloud observability and secure connectivity analytics. The focus will shift from raw bandwidth optimization to ensuring consistent digital experience that meets both productivity and compliance benchmarks. The approaches to address these will combine zero-trust principles with real-time path performance monitoring — aligning user experience with governance across home, branch, and cloud environments.
Erez Tadmor
Field CTO, Tufin

END-USER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

EUEM in 2026 - From IT Metric to Business Catalyst: In 2026, End-User Experience Management (EUEM) will evolve from a backend IT metric to a frontline business driver. As digital ecosystems grow more distributed and user expectations rise, organizations must shift from designing for ideal conditions to optimizing for real-world user behavior. EUEM, powered by AI-driven design intelligence and continuous experience monitoring, enables enterprises to deliver intuitive, adaptive, and inclusive digital interfaces. By embedding experience metrics into the software development lifecycle, teams can reduce friction, accelerate adoption, and transform user satisfaction into measurable business outcomes.
Rajender Earra
Senior Director, Techwave

THE DEX RECKONING

The DEX Reckoning - From Buzzword to Business Value: Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is entering its proving ground. Over the past two years, vendors have rushed to rebrand, pivot, or bolt on "DEX capabilities" in response to enterprise demand for better user experience management. But 2026 will be the year that separates the genuine innovators from the opportunists. Organizations will demand evidence that DEX actually improves productivity, reduces support costs, and enhances security, not just that it provides dashboards and metrics. For IT leaders, this means consolidating toolsets and focusing on platforms that tie user experience directly to measurable outcomes: faster device remediation, reduced downtime, and better digital well-being for distributed teams. Those that can show ROI and connect DEX data to business impact will solidify their place in enterprise IT. Those that can’t will quietly fade back into the noise of endpoint monitoring.
Michael Shuster
CEO, Ferroque Systems

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE MEASURED BY BUSINESS OUTCOMES

Website performance will be plotted against key business outcomes using key metrics like conversion rates and SEO rankings, with possible automation techniques used to continuously correct them instead of manual revisions in text and design. In 2026, real user and synthetic monitoring will come handy for IT operations teams, which can integrate these insights with analytics tools to enable AI-driven prioritization and automatic remediation of web vitals. AI can help dynamically adjust content delivery based on user behavior and geography, ensuring consistently low latency and improved user engagement.
Srinivasa Raghavan Santhanam
Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

CORE WEB VITALS

Support for Core Web Vitals will become more inclusive when Safari rereleases support for Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint in 2026 (currently in Safari tech preview). This is fantastic news for site owners with large numbers of iOS users. However, it will highlight gaps in traditional performance monitoring. WebKit (Safari) lacks support in synthetic tooling, and the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) — the source of truth for Google search ranking — will NOT include WebKit data. I predict we'll see more experimentation with synthetic iOS testing and a renewed focus on frontend RUM solutions that provide a holistic view of the user experience.
Cliff Crocker
VP of Product, Embrace

AI-BASED BROWSING

AI-based browsing is going to start changing the way we think about experiences. Interactivity from AI-driven experiences will increase the acuity of performance problems in user experiences, leading to increased demand to deliver mobile and web experiences that perform well.
Andrew Tunall
President and CPO, Embrace

SERVICEOPS POWERED BY AGENTIC AI

ITSM in 2026 - Organizations will Embrace IT Service Operations (ServiceOps) Models for Superior Service and Resilience, Powered by Agentic AI: In 2026, agentic AI will accelerate the shift from traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) to provide employees with a one-stop shop for issues and requests. ITSM, ESM, and IT will be combined into a single, intelligent ecosystem. AI agents will be able to quickly address requests and resolve a broad range of issues, coming directly to employees in the systems they use for everyday collaboration — a market movement highlighted by Gartner in 2025 and reinforced in the recent Forrester ESM Wave. With employees becoming comfortable interacting with AI agents, companies in certain industries are beginning to phase out phone lines as self-service becomes the preferred channel for all. While service desks won't disappear in 2026, or maybe ever, they will be drastically remade. Frictionless self-service will reduce the volume of filed tickets, accelerate time-to-value for new AI agents, and position ServiceOps as a strategic driver of both operational efficiency and enterprise-wide simplicity.
Ryan Manning
Chief Product Officer, BMC Helix

TICKETLESS OPERATIONS

Ticketless Operations Will Eclipse Ticket Automation: Most ITOps automation initiatives focus on resolving tickets faster — using AI to categorize, route, and even resolve common issues. But in 2026, the more ambitious goal of ticketless operations will start to gain traction. The distinction matters: ticket automation reduces human efforts in IT operations, ticketless operations eliminates it entirely. Ticketless operations depend on AI systems ability to detect problems before users are impacted, taking corrective action autonomously before the problem is even noticeable. Imagine a network connectivity issue, the system detects the degraded performance, diagnoses the issue, and resolves it before user experience is negatively impacted and frustration results on multiple help desk calls. This requires the same proactive AI architecture described earlier, that is, systems that monitor continuously, interpret context, and act without reactive triggers. It also demands a higher threshold of trust, since failures in autonomous action create new categories of risk. But for organizations drowning in ticket volumes, the promise of prevention over reaction represents a compelling operational model.
Efrain Ruh
Regional CTO, Digitate

ITSM BECOMES SYSTEM OF RECORD

Observability Becomes Lightweight and ITSM Shifts to a System of Record: Full-stack observability will evolve into lightweight aggregation and normalization layers, while ITSM will increasingly serve as the system of record for auditability, change, and compliance. Intelligence and orchestration will shift to adaptive AI layers, minimizing tool lock-in and enabling modernization without disruptive re-platforming. This architecture will favor flexibility, interoperability, and faster time to value.
Casey Kindiger
CEO, Grokstream

ITSM EXPANDS BEYOND IT

Unified Service Delivery Bridges ITSM and Enterprise Service Management: ITSM platforms will fully extend beyond IT into HR, facilities, finance, and other business functions as organizations push toward unified service delivery in 2026. Enterprise service management (ESM) will accelerate as teams standardize service catalogs, fulfillment workflows, and case-management practices across departments. This shift will require shared taxonomies, stronger governance, and common automation frameworks to support true cross-functional service flows. Companies that achieve this integration will deliver higher efficiency, better employee experience, and greater transparency in how services operate across the enterprise.
Parker Hathcock
Research Director, ServiceOps, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

Go to: 2026 Observability Predictions - Part 5, covering APM and infrastructure monitoring

The Latest

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...

2026 Observability Predictions - Part 4

In APMdigest's 2026 Observability Predictions Series, industry experts — from analysts and consultants to the top vendors — offer predictions on how Observability and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2026. Part 4 covers user experience, digital performance, website performance and ITSM.

USER-FOCUSED OBSERVABILITY

Business leaders will start to realize that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the realm of mobile and web observability. Crash reporting and RUM tell you what's happening on mobile and web apps, but on their own, they do little to quantify the impact to user behavior when app performance and quality regresses or improves. The ability to link mobile observability data to what is more traditionally seen as product analytics (i.e., data that models user intention and outcomes) will unlock a new use-case — User-Focused Observability — whereby changes to user behavior can be linked to changes in app performance and vice versa, finally answering the question: what is this app perf problem costing my business in terms of revenue, DAU, and other KPIs?
Hanson Ho
Android Architect, Embrace

DIGITAL PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Digital performance management (DPM) is evolving to become an IT discipline, and it will be put into serious practice in 2026 and beyond. DPM works by correlating technical service metrics with extended SLAs, measuring real user and employee experiences. Integrations across application performance management, end-use experience management, and network monitoring with AI-enabled business intelligence will help large IT teams with a scattered global workforce identify performance bottlenecks ahead of the curve, ensuring business goals are not hampered by poor performance such as shopping cart abandonment. DPM will also involve automations to guard mission-critical revenue-generating services first.
Srinivasa Raghavan Santhanam
Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

ANALYST REPORT: 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Monitoring

REMOTE DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

In the coming years, end-user experience management (EUEM) will be considered a strategic business priority, largely due to how our workforces, workplaces, and workloads have changed in the era of hybrid work. Practices like correlating deep client-side monitoring with qualitative sentiment data, like relating user surveys with help desk tickets using AI, will help identify gaps to fix digital friction points. A holistic grasp of how your products are actually received at the last mile, enabled by EUEM, will enhance employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention.
Srinivasa Raghavan Santhanam
Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

Remote and hybrid workforces will continue to expose blind spots in application performance and network visibility. In 2026, enterprises will invest heavily in endpoint-to-cloud observability and secure connectivity analytics. The focus will shift from raw bandwidth optimization to ensuring consistent digital experience that meets both productivity and compliance benchmarks. The approaches to address these will combine zero-trust principles with real-time path performance monitoring — aligning user experience with governance across home, branch, and cloud environments.
Erez Tadmor
Field CTO, Tufin

END-USER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT

EUEM in 2026 - From IT Metric to Business Catalyst: In 2026, End-User Experience Management (EUEM) will evolve from a backend IT metric to a frontline business driver. As digital ecosystems grow more distributed and user expectations rise, organizations must shift from designing for ideal conditions to optimizing for real-world user behavior. EUEM, powered by AI-driven design intelligence and continuous experience monitoring, enables enterprises to deliver intuitive, adaptive, and inclusive digital interfaces. By embedding experience metrics into the software development lifecycle, teams can reduce friction, accelerate adoption, and transform user satisfaction into measurable business outcomes.
Rajender Earra
Senior Director, Techwave

THE DEX RECKONING

The DEX Reckoning - From Buzzword to Business Value: Digital Employee Experience (DEX) is entering its proving ground. Over the past two years, vendors have rushed to rebrand, pivot, or bolt on "DEX capabilities" in response to enterprise demand for better user experience management. But 2026 will be the year that separates the genuine innovators from the opportunists. Organizations will demand evidence that DEX actually improves productivity, reduces support costs, and enhances security, not just that it provides dashboards and metrics. For IT leaders, this means consolidating toolsets and focusing on platforms that tie user experience directly to measurable outcomes: faster device remediation, reduced downtime, and better digital well-being for distributed teams. Those that can show ROI and connect DEX data to business impact will solidify their place in enterprise IT. Those that can’t will quietly fade back into the noise of endpoint monitoring.
Michael Shuster
CEO, Ferroque Systems

WEBSITE PERFORMANCE MEASURED BY BUSINESS OUTCOMES

Website performance will be plotted against key business outcomes using key metrics like conversion rates and SEO rankings, with possible automation techniques used to continuously correct them instead of manual revisions in text and design. In 2026, real user and synthetic monitoring will come handy for IT operations teams, which can integrate these insights with analytics tools to enable AI-driven prioritization and automatic remediation of web vitals. AI can help dynamically adjust content delivery based on user behavior and geography, ensuring consistently low latency and improved user engagement.
Srinivasa Raghavan Santhanam
Director of Product Management, ManageEngine

CORE WEB VITALS

Support for Core Web Vitals will become more inclusive when Safari rereleases support for Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint in 2026 (currently in Safari tech preview). This is fantastic news for site owners with large numbers of iOS users. However, it will highlight gaps in traditional performance monitoring. WebKit (Safari) lacks support in synthetic tooling, and the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) — the source of truth for Google search ranking — will NOT include WebKit data. I predict we'll see more experimentation with synthetic iOS testing and a renewed focus on frontend RUM solutions that provide a holistic view of the user experience.
Cliff Crocker
VP of Product, Embrace

AI-BASED BROWSING

AI-based browsing is going to start changing the way we think about experiences. Interactivity from AI-driven experiences will increase the acuity of performance problems in user experiences, leading to increased demand to deliver mobile and web experiences that perform well.
Andrew Tunall
President and CPO, Embrace

SERVICEOPS POWERED BY AGENTIC AI

ITSM in 2026 - Organizations will Embrace IT Service Operations (ServiceOps) Models for Superior Service and Resilience, Powered by Agentic AI: In 2026, agentic AI will accelerate the shift from traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) to provide employees with a one-stop shop for issues and requests. ITSM, ESM, and IT will be combined into a single, intelligent ecosystem. AI agents will be able to quickly address requests and resolve a broad range of issues, coming directly to employees in the systems they use for everyday collaboration — a market movement highlighted by Gartner in 2025 and reinforced in the recent Forrester ESM Wave. With employees becoming comfortable interacting with AI agents, companies in certain industries are beginning to phase out phone lines as self-service becomes the preferred channel for all. While service desks won't disappear in 2026, or maybe ever, they will be drastically remade. Frictionless self-service will reduce the volume of filed tickets, accelerate time-to-value for new AI agents, and position ServiceOps as a strategic driver of both operational efficiency and enterprise-wide simplicity.
Ryan Manning
Chief Product Officer, BMC Helix

TICKETLESS OPERATIONS

Ticketless Operations Will Eclipse Ticket Automation: Most ITOps automation initiatives focus on resolving tickets faster — using AI to categorize, route, and even resolve common issues. But in 2026, the more ambitious goal of ticketless operations will start to gain traction. The distinction matters: ticket automation reduces human efforts in IT operations, ticketless operations eliminates it entirely. Ticketless operations depend on AI systems ability to detect problems before users are impacted, taking corrective action autonomously before the problem is even noticeable. Imagine a network connectivity issue, the system detects the degraded performance, diagnoses the issue, and resolves it before user experience is negatively impacted and frustration results on multiple help desk calls. This requires the same proactive AI architecture described earlier, that is, systems that monitor continuously, interpret context, and act without reactive triggers. It also demands a higher threshold of trust, since failures in autonomous action create new categories of risk. But for organizations drowning in ticket volumes, the promise of prevention over reaction represents a compelling operational model.
Efrain Ruh
Regional CTO, Digitate

ITSM BECOMES SYSTEM OF RECORD

Observability Becomes Lightweight and ITSM Shifts to a System of Record: Full-stack observability will evolve into lightweight aggregation and normalization layers, while ITSM will increasingly serve as the system of record for auditability, change, and compliance. Intelligence and orchestration will shift to adaptive AI layers, minimizing tool lock-in and enabling modernization without disruptive re-platforming. This architecture will favor flexibility, interoperability, and faster time to value.
Casey Kindiger
CEO, Grokstream

ITSM EXPANDS BEYOND IT

Unified Service Delivery Bridges ITSM and Enterprise Service Management: ITSM platforms will fully extend beyond IT into HR, facilities, finance, and other business functions as organizations push toward unified service delivery in 2026. Enterprise service management (ESM) will accelerate as teams standardize service catalogs, fulfillment workflows, and case-management practices across departments. This shift will require shared taxonomies, stronger governance, and common automation frameworks to support true cross-functional service flows. Companies that achieve this integration will deliver higher efficiency, better employee experience, and greater transparency in how services operate across the enterprise.
Parker Hathcock
Research Director, ServiceOps, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

Go to: 2026 Observability Predictions - Part 5, covering APM and infrastructure monitoring

The Latest

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...