2026 Observability Predictions - Part 8

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 8 covers outages, downtime and availability.

MOBILE AND WEBAPP PERFORMANCE FAILURES

SREs and o11y practitioners will realize that app performance regressions and failures can happen outside the data center and within mobile and web apps. Not only that, they happen quite frequently, and most of them go unnoticed unless they result in a crash or an error that is actively monitored. More subtle client-side issues like perf regressions are often not recorded as telemetry at all particularly in mobile, so they silently kill app performance, one cut at a time. The result? Unexplained reduction in app quality and headwind for adoption and usage growth.
Hanson Ho
Android Architect, Embrace

AI-GENERATED OUTAGES

As adoption grows, more AI generated outages follow: As AI-generated code and prompts proliferate, so will incidents caused by them. Developers will need stricter reviews and guardrails to ensure AI-generated code meets production-quality standards.
Daniel Afonso
Senior Developer Advocate, PagerDuty

SINGLE CLOUD DEPENDENCE

2025 has proven that even the largest and most sophisticated cloud platforms are vulnerable. This year alone, outages rippled across the services that power our daily lives — impacting OpenAI, Snapchat, Canva, Venmo, Fortnite, Starbucks, Atlassian, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, and so many others. Billions of dollars were lost not because technology failed — but because single-cloud dependence has become a single point of failure.

The causes vary — DNS misconfigurations, automation bugs, network failures — but the result is identical: disruption at global scale without warning. Today's architectures are still built on the assumption that hyperscalers will always stay online. They won't. And resilience can't be a box checked after deployment.
Being multi-cloud isn't about paying multiple bills. It's about intentional design — ensuring applications, data, identity controls, networking, and security can operate across environments without heavy rework. Kubernetes solved part of the puzzle, but portability must extend far beyond containers.

In 2026 companies will need to treat resilience as a first-class requirement. They will build systems that can adapt in real time, shift workloads seamlessly, and maintain continuity no matter which provider is experiencing an outage. The pattern of cloud failures will no longer be theoretical — it's here. The future demands resilience by design.
Harshit Omar
CTO and Co-Founder, FluidCloud

THE HUMAN FACTOR

The Human Factor - Tackling IT's Biggest Blind Spot: I think the biggest blind spot we'll see in 2026 will come from the disconnection between IT teams. The blame game is still prevalent, and teams continue to use different tools with disparate data sets, making it challenging to fully collaborate. According to recent data, more than one in three DBAs (38%) say they've considered leaving their current role with the top reason being poor management. Additionally, misunderstanding what our observability tools are telling us can also occur when we lack the necessary general knowledge to process the information properly. We're on our way to human-readable outputs, but in IT, you still need to grasp the basic concepts of how things are connected to each other and how they work towards the greater goal — for example, how the database contributes to the end-user web experience. Enhancing our own technical and interpersonal skills is critical to avoiding the blind spots created by these biases and games. 
Chrystal Taylor
Evangelist, SolarWinds

In 2026, the cracks from years of flattened org charts will start to show. Engineering teams need strong managers to navigate massive change, from driving AI adoption to rethinking security, but many have now underinvested in those capabilities. Most haven't yet updated their practices for the "vibe coding" era, and it will likely take a major AI-driven security incident to spark that reckoning. The teams that thrive will be those grounded in observability and other DevOps fundamentals, teams that can see clearly how systems behave, learn quickly from real signals, and use that insight to turn automation into lasting progress.
Emily Nakashima
SVP of Engineering, Honeycomb

CLOUD OUTAGE FAILOVER

With AWS and Cloudflare outages hitting in quick succession late in 2025, and increasing interest in "cloud repatriation" generally, expect a sharp increase in interest over the next year in self-managed LLM-based development tools, and particularly self-hosting those tools with the intent to provide a failover capability during outages of specific cloud-based ones. When entire enterprises' critical workflows are based on a specific cloud-based tool, it makes enterprise-level sense to have a local fallback for it, even if it's smaller-scale and somewhat less-capable than the cloud-based service.
Joe Thompson
Cloud-Native Architect, Clarity Business Solutions

RELIABILITY DEBT

SLOs move from dashboards to decisions: Reliability debt has become a budget problem. The cost of downtime can exceed thousands of dollars per minute, and teams are feeling it. While service level objectives (SLOs) are nearly universal, with 86% of organizations using them primarily for compliance, alerting, or reporting, almost no one uses them to change behavior. In 2026, that finally shifts, not because of tooling, but because of that reliability debt. Expect to see teams quantify the economic cost of downtime, integrating SLOs directly into sprint planning and executive reporting. The next frontier isn't defining SLOs; it's enforcing them. Reliability is now a business conversation, not just an engineering one.
Richard Lamm
Product Director, Grafana Labs

RESLIENCE MEASURED BY BUSINESS IMPACT

Resilience becomes measurable and monetized: Boards and investors will start demanding quantifiable resilience metrics — not just uptime, but how fast the business can recover and adapt after disruption. Resilience will evolve from an aspiration to a tangible KPI.
Ha Hoang
CIO, Commvault

AIOPS FORECASTS INCIDENT COSTS

In  2026, leading organizations will use AIOps to forecast revenue, customer  experience  and regulatory risk implications of an incident,  prioritizing responses based not only on  how quickly something can be fixed, but on the overall value at risk.
Sunil Senan
Global Head of Data, Analytics and AI, Infosys

RESILIENCE MEASURED BY USER IMPACT

Operational Resilience Will Be Measured in User Experience, Not System Status: 2026 will mark a turning point where uptime is no longer defined by system availability alone, but by a seamless user experience. Whether it's a delayed flight, a missed telehealth appointment, or an inaccessible emergency service, modern disruptions are judged by how they impact users. Disruptions can erode in seconds trust that took an organization years to build, with more than half of consumers saying they will stop using or buying from a brand after a negative experience. This shift is fueled by a recognition that resilience isn't just about backup systems for rare disasters. Instead, it's about an organization's ability to deliver high-quality, uninterrupted services despite disruptions. To achieve this, organizations will need to refine their cybersecurity and observability strategies, breaking down silos between NetOps and SecOps. Packet-level network observability will be essential, enabling teams to distinguish between harmless latency spikes and cyber events that disrupt core services.
Eileen Haggerty
AVP, Product and Solutions Marketing, NETSCOUT

POLICY-DRIVEN RESILIENCE

Resilience Becomes the New Compliance - Core Infrastructure Under the Microscope: Resilience will evolve from an IT goal to a board-level business imperative, driven by tightening regulatory frameworks like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and emerging global standards for critical infrastructure continuity. Organizations will be required to demonstrate verifiable resilience across their digital backbone, particularly in core DNS, identity, and certificate management systems, as auditors and regulators link uptime and recoverability to financial stability. This shift will usher in an era of policy-driven resilience, where compliance isn't just about avoiding downtime, but proving that every component of digital trust can withstand disruption by design."
Jason Sabin
CTO, DigiCert

HIGH AVAILABILITY CLUSTERING

DevOps teams will increasingly integrate high availability clustering into application planning to reduce deployment risk — Clustering tools with robust APIs, automation hooks, and real-time observability will allow rapid updates without interrupting production services. DevOps engineers will use clusters to test patches against active workloads, reducing the risk and degree of change. HA becomes a built-in feature of the delivery process—not an afterthought.
Cassius Rhue
VP of Customer Experience, SIOS Technology

Go to: 2026 Observability Predictions - Part 9, covering Observability for AI

Related Links

Hot Topics

2026 Observability Predictions - Part 8

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 8 covers outages, downtime and availability.

MOBILE AND WEBAPP PERFORMANCE FAILURES

SREs and o11y practitioners will realize that app performance regressions and failures can happen outside the data center and within mobile and web apps. Not only that, they happen quite frequently, and most of them go unnoticed unless they result in a crash or an error that is actively monitored. More subtle client-side issues like perf regressions are often not recorded as telemetry at all particularly in mobile, so they silently kill app performance, one cut at a time. The result? Unexplained reduction in app quality and headwind for adoption and usage growth.
Hanson Ho
Android Architect, Embrace

AI-GENERATED OUTAGES

As adoption grows, more AI generated outages follow: As AI-generated code and prompts proliferate, so will incidents caused by them. Developers will need stricter reviews and guardrails to ensure AI-generated code meets production-quality standards.
Daniel Afonso
Senior Developer Advocate, PagerDuty

SINGLE CLOUD DEPENDENCE

2025 has proven that even the largest and most sophisticated cloud platforms are vulnerable. This year alone, outages rippled across the services that power our daily lives — impacting OpenAI, Snapchat, Canva, Venmo, Fortnite, Starbucks, Atlassian, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, and so many others. Billions of dollars were lost not because technology failed — but because single-cloud dependence has become a single point of failure.

The causes vary — DNS misconfigurations, automation bugs, network failures — but the result is identical: disruption at global scale without warning. Today's architectures are still built on the assumption that hyperscalers will always stay online. They won't. And resilience can't be a box checked after deployment.
Being multi-cloud isn't about paying multiple bills. It's about intentional design — ensuring applications, data, identity controls, networking, and security can operate across environments without heavy rework. Kubernetes solved part of the puzzle, but portability must extend far beyond containers.

In 2026 companies will need to treat resilience as a first-class requirement. They will build systems that can adapt in real time, shift workloads seamlessly, and maintain continuity no matter which provider is experiencing an outage. The pattern of cloud failures will no longer be theoretical — it's here. The future demands resilience by design.
Harshit Omar
CTO and Co-Founder, FluidCloud

THE HUMAN FACTOR

The Human Factor - Tackling IT's Biggest Blind Spot: I think the biggest blind spot we'll see in 2026 will come from the disconnection between IT teams. The blame game is still prevalent, and teams continue to use different tools with disparate data sets, making it challenging to fully collaborate. According to recent data, more than one in three DBAs (38%) say they've considered leaving their current role with the top reason being poor management. Additionally, misunderstanding what our observability tools are telling us can also occur when we lack the necessary general knowledge to process the information properly. We're on our way to human-readable outputs, but in IT, you still need to grasp the basic concepts of how things are connected to each other and how they work towards the greater goal — for example, how the database contributes to the end-user web experience. Enhancing our own technical and interpersonal skills is critical to avoiding the blind spots created by these biases and games. 
Chrystal Taylor
Evangelist, SolarWinds

In 2026, the cracks from years of flattened org charts will start to show. Engineering teams need strong managers to navigate massive change, from driving AI adoption to rethinking security, but many have now underinvested in those capabilities. Most haven't yet updated their practices for the "vibe coding" era, and it will likely take a major AI-driven security incident to spark that reckoning. The teams that thrive will be those grounded in observability and other DevOps fundamentals, teams that can see clearly how systems behave, learn quickly from real signals, and use that insight to turn automation into lasting progress.
Emily Nakashima
SVP of Engineering, Honeycomb

CLOUD OUTAGE FAILOVER

With AWS and Cloudflare outages hitting in quick succession late in 2025, and increasing interest in "cloud repatriation" generally, expect a sharp increase in interest over the next year in self-managed LLM-based development tools, and particularly self-hosting those tools with the intent to provide a failover capability during outages of specific cloud-based ones. When entire enterprises' critical workflows are based on a specific cloud-based tool, it makes enterprise-level sense to have a local fallback for it, even if it's smaller-scale and somewhat less-capable than the cloud-based service.
Joe Thompson
Cloud-Native Architect, Clarity Business Solutions

RELIABILITY DEBT

SLOs move from dashboards to decisions: Reliability debt has become a budget problem. The cost of downtime can exceed thousands of dollars per minute, and teams are feeling it. While service level objectives (SLOs) are nearly universal, with 86% of organizations using them primarily for compliance, alerting, or reporting, almost no one uses them to change behavior. In 2026, that finally shifts, not because of tooling, but because of that reliability debt. Expect to see teams quantify the economic cost of downtime, integrating SLOs directly into sprint planning and executive reporting. The next frontier isn't defining SLOs; it's enforcing them. Reliability is now a business conversation, not just an engineering one.
Richard Lamm
Product Director, Grafana Labs

RESLIENCE MEASURED BY BUSINESS IMPACT

Resilience becomes measurable and monetized: Boards and investors will start demanding quantifiable resilience metrics — not just uptime, but how fast the business can recover and adapt after disruption. Resilience will evolve from an aspiration to a tangible KPI.
Ha Hoang
CIO, Commvault

AIOPS FORECASTS INCIDENT COSTS

In  2026, leading organizations will use AIOps to forecast revenue, customer  experience  and regulatory risk implications of an incident,  prioritizing responses based not only on  how quickly something can be fixed, but on the overall value at risk.
Sunil Senan
Global Head of Data, Analytics and AI, Infosys

RESILIENCE MEASURED BY USER IMPACT

Operational Resilience Will Be Measured in User Experience, Not System Status: 2026 will mark a turning point where uptime is no longer defined by system availability alone, but by a seamless user experience. Whether it's a delayed flight, a missed telehealth appointment, or an inaccessible emergency service, modern disruptions are judged by how they impact users. Disruptions can erode in seconds trust that took an organization years to build, with more than half of consumers saying they will stop using or buying from a brand after a negative experience. This shift is fueled by a recognition that resilience isn't just about backup systems for rare disasters. Instead, it's about an organization's ability to deliver high-quality, uninterrupted services despite disruptions. To achieve this, organizations will need to refine their cybersecurity and observability strategies, breaking down silos between NetOps and SecOps. Packet-level network observability will be essential, enabling teams to distinguish between harmless latency spikes and cyber events that disrupt core services.
Eileen Haggerty
AVP, Product and Solutions Marketing, NETSCOUT

POLICY-DRIVEN RESILIENCE

Resilience Becomes the New Compliance - Core Infrastructure Under the Microscope: Resilience will evolve from an IT goal to a board-level business imperative, driven by tightening regulatory frameworks like the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and emerging global standards for critical infrastructure continuity. Organizations will be required to demonstrate verifiable resilience across their digital backbone, particularly in core DNS, identity, and certificate management systems, as auditors and regulators link uptime and recoverability to financial stability. This shift will usher in an era of policy-driven resilience, where compliance isn't just about avoiding downtime, but proving that every component of digital trust can withstand disruption by design."
Jason Sabin
CTO, DigiCert

HIGH AVAILABILITY CLUSTERING

DevOps teams will increasingly integrate high availability clustering into application planning to reduce deployment risk — Clustering tools with robust APIs, automation hooks, and real-time observability will allow rapid updates without interrupting production services. DevOps engineers will use clusters to test patches against active workloads, reducing the risk and degree of change. HA becomes a built-in feature of the delivery process—not an afterthought.
Cassius Rhue
VP of Customer Experience, SIOS Technology

Go to: 2026 Observability Predictions - Part 9, covering Observability for AI

Related Links

Hot Topics