Top 8 observability trends to watch in 2026

What is driving observability trends for 2026?

Insights garnered through observability enable IT teams to make data-driven decisions. That means they can proactively detect, diagnose and resolve issues -- and automate a significant portion of those activities. Moreover, observability enables IT teams to perform those tasks faster than monitoring does, which boosts efficiency and productivity, lowers the mean time to resolution and speeds innovation within IT deployments.

All this means better experiences for the organization's employees and its customers, who benefit from stable, reliable, faster and resilient applications, according to Aykut Duman, a partner in the digital and analytics practice at Kearney, a strategy and management consulting firm.

The organization itself benefits, too, thanks to the efficiency and productivity gains as well as optimized operations, improved security due to increased visibility of dependencies and vulnerabilities, and more satisfied end users, he added.

Furthermore, observability helps ensure smooth AI operations, said Shrinath Thube, a senior member in the professional association IEEE. Just as observability uses telemetry to understand the performance of conventional systems within the IT environment, observability tracks metrics such as latency, throughput and resource utilization -- all of which are crucial to ensuring the successful use of AI in the enterprise.

Research shows that the need for insights into AI systems and the other benefits that observability delivers are pushing organizations to mature their use of observability, or adopt it, if they haven't already.

"Organizations are recognizing the importance of observability for delivering efficient cloud-native environments and successful AI projects and are increasing their investment in it," researchers wrote in Dynatrace's "The State of Observability 2025" report.

The report noted that 70% of respondents saw increased observability budgets in the past year and 75% expected to increase those budgets in the next fiscal year.

8 observability trends to watch

As observability evolves and organizations mature their use of it, researchers and analysts highlighted the following trends for 2026.

1. Improvements to observability platforms drive adoption, maturity

"The maturity and capabilities of the platforms have really advanced in the last few years. I feel like this is giving enterprises and tech leaders more confidence in the tools to surface vital insights," Casanova said.

2. IT environment complexity also drives adoption and maturity

"Additionally, I just don't think organizations have much choice," Casanova continued. "You simply cannot manage today's IT environments with yesterday's technologies, and you certainly can no longer just try to supplement it with more bodies. The environments are moving too fast for manual processes that aren't highly enriched with AI and automation."

3. Organizations turn to observability to support the use of AI

Observability is critical for ensuring accurate outputs from AI systems and building trust in those outputs, Thube said.

"It's very difficult to build trust without knowing or understanding how AI works or what it's doing with our data, which is why observability is important for AI as well. The more we observe, the more we trust," he explained.

4. AI will do more work in observability

Observability tools have used AI to detect anomalies and predict issues for some time. But now observability tools are moving into AIOps, where the technology delivers proactive remediation.

"As observability platforms continue to move toward enabling and executing automation, you'll see more organizations gaining confidence in them and allowing them to run more autonomously," Casanova said. "The bigger picture is how this will enable AIOps platforms to move closer to enabling self-healing actions in 2026 in controlled settings."

5. There will be more uptake of OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open source framework that provides vendor-neutral/vendor-agnostic APIs and SDKs for collecting and analyzing telemetry data. Organizations can use OTel to gather telemetry data from applications, underlying infrastructures and services. They can also use OTel's vendor-neutral technique to receive, process, convert and export data.

Duman said that the use of OTel can help an organization eliminate vendor lock-in and get unified telemetry across metrics, logs and traces.

According to “The Landscape of Observability in 2026,” the adoption of OTel in production jumped from 6% in 2025 to 11% in 2026, while those experimenting with it went from 31% to 36% year over year.

6. There will be more platform consolidation

Duman said he has seen a growing number of organizations consolidating their observability tools, a trend he expects will continue in 2026. He said organizations have accumulated many different tools, often having a different one for each cloud environment they have.

"But now as they mature, they're trying to bring them together," he said, adding that platform consolidation can aid in identifying root causes more effectively. The observability landscape report found that 51% of teams listed "consolidating existing observability toolsets" as a step they're taking to reduce observability costs.

7. More organizations will optimize observability spending/reduce observability costs

The same report found that 96% of teams are taking steps to reduce observability costs. In addition to platform consolidation, they're "evaluating tool licensing costs, data volume expenses, infrastructure workloads and more." The report also found that 42% of respondents said they're eliminating observability for their less-critical environments to save money.

8. Organizations will use observability to support business objectives

Another trend identified in the observability landscape report is a move toward organizations using observability to understand "how their efforts can improve broader business outcomes." According to the report, only 17% of observability teams solely focus on system performance, whereas 83% use observability data to report on business impact.

The future of observability

Looking beyond 2026, analysts and researchers expect organizations that have not yet implemented observability will do so -- driven as much by the need to ensure the successful use of AI use as they are by the need to have stable, reliable, resilient IT operations.

They further predict that observability will continue to become more intelligent through the increasing use of AI, leading to greater automation and proactive remediation. They also said more organizations will move toward aligning observability with business outcomes.

There will, however, be challenges in getting to those marks of a mature observability practice. The most common roadblocks for organizations looking to advance observability are challenges with data, costs and skill.

Conclusion

Yet a growing number of enterprise executives view observability as a business necessity, not just an IT discipline, due to its importance in supporting reliable, resilient, secure and strong technology environments.

"Observability will be viewed in the same light as we view monitoring today. It's just something you must do well if you want to maintain high-quality systems. The hype around the word will fade, and people will just know they need to apply lots of energy to understand how the systems function, their nuances and when they're not behaving as expected," Casanova added.

"AIOps/autonomous IT operations platforms will become the operational nexus for far more than IT," he continued. "They will enable FinOps, BizOps and a multitude of other enterprise areas that rely on contextualized information about how not only how IT is running but how it relates to business outcomes."

Mary K. Pratt is an award-winning freelance journalist with a focus on covering enterprise IT and cybersecurity management.