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

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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

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Exploring AI Observability – Part 5: Roles

AI observability serves several roles across an organization. AI engineers use it to build, evaluate, and improve AI systems. SREs use it to operate those systems reliably and efficiently in production, including managing their cost. Leaders need it to connect AI behavior and operational performance to business outcomes. The common need is a clear understanding of whether AI systems are delivering the intended result ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 4: Challenges

Part 4 outlines the challenges enterprise face when adopting AI observability. The main challenge is that AI complexity compounds at every stage of maturity. LLM-based applications introduce new behavior, dependencies, and quality considerations, while Agentic AI adds further failure modes as systems make decisions and take actions ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 3: The Current State of AI Observability

Part 3 reports on the current state of AI observability. Most experts agree: enterprises are moving faster with AI than they are with the operational discipline needed to run it safely ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 2: Traditional vs. AI Observability

When discussing AI Observability, one of the first questions that arises: Is this just an extension of traditional observability or is this a whole new type of tool? Part 2 compares traditional observability with AI observability ...

Exploring AI Observability – Part 1: Why It Matters

In this extensive 14-part series that will post over the next three weeks, experts across observability and AI will provide insight and opinions on the need for AI Observability, the challenges, the benefits, the current state, and predictions for the future ...

AgenticOps Scaling Quickly in the Enterprise

Amid rising complexity, organizations are moving quickly toward agent-driven operations: AgenticOps, according to The Impact of Agentic AI on Network Operations, a new report from Cisco ...

Why Better Technology Won't Fix a Broken Workflow

AI, automation, and enterprise software give organizations an extraordinary amount of leverage. Work that once required hours can happen in minutes. Information buried across systems can be analyzed almost instantly. Complex workflows can be coordinated across teams with far less manual intervention. That leverage creates a temptation to start with the technology ...

What If AI's Biggest Competitive Advantage Isn't the Model?

Everyone wants to talk about models. Compute clusters. Benchmark scores that climb a fraction of a point and make headlines anyway. It's an easy conversation to have because it's measurable. But it's also increasingly beside the point ...

Why Going All-In on Cloud No Longer Works in the Age of AI

For more than a decade, the default infrastructure play has been simple. Move more workloads to the cloud, retire on-premises gear and treat the data center as a cost to shrink. That logic held while public cloud offered near-limitless capacity at predictable prices, and AI demand is now testing both halves of that assumption ...

Visibility Is Not a Strategy - What Matters Is What Happens Next

Most enterprise IT leaders can tell you exactly how many applications are running across their organization. They can surface a dashboard showing telecom spend by region, pull a report on SaaS license utilization, or call up a real-time view of mobile device inventory. The data is there, and IT leaders have largely delivered on the promise of visibility. Yet, in most organizations, that visibility has not translated into business value ...