As IT organizations enter 2026, many assumptions about observability have already been tested. Throughout the last year, infrastructure teams made it clear that visibility alone is not enough. Alerts without context, short data retention, and fragmented tools limited teams’ ability to explain behavior, validate changes, and plan with confidence.
This article reflects on what emerged from those experiences and how observability expectations continue to evolve. It focuses on where teams relied most on observability, where gaps created friction, and what capabilities increasingly matter as IT environments grow more interconnected and accountable.
Many of the pressures teams carried into 2026 were already visible in how they approached observability throughout the past year.
Moving Beyond Traditional Monitoring
Many of the observability challenges teams encountered in 2025 traced back to the same limitations that have existed for years. Monitoring platforms built around snapshots and rolled-up data often fall short when teams need to understand trends, investigate change, or explain why systems behave the way they do over time.
Throughout 2025, more organizations have come to rely on Galileo for its ability to go beyond alerting into capacity planning, performance optimization, and other initiatives that require a deeper understanding of infrastructure behavior over time. Galileo’s retention of full-resolution historical data allowed teams to move beyond reactive response and toward analysis that supported validation and planning.
This shift reflected a broader realization: observability is most valuable when it supports understanding, not just notification.
Observability as Decision Infrastructure
As environments grew more complex, observability increasingly served a different purpose. It became less about identifying incidents and more about supporting decisions.
Teams used observability data to explain outcomes, justify changes, and communicate risk across technical and executive audiences. When systems behaved unexpectedly, the question was no longer just what happened, but whether teams could explain why and defend the actions taken in response.
This elevated the importance of consistency and trust in observability data. Platforms that could not preserve history, correlate across domains, or provide defensible context struggled to support the level of accountability expected in modern IT operations.
Data-Driven Operations and Responsible Automation
Automation continues to play a growing role in IT operations, and last year reinforced an important lesson: automation is only as reliable as the data that informs it.
Teams increasingly paired observability with automation workflows to reduce manual effort while maintaining control. Reliable telemetry made it possible to validate assumptions, set appropriate thresholds, and ensure automated actions aligned with real system behavior rather than transient conditions.
In practice, observability became a prerequisite for responsible automation. Historical context allowed teams to test, refine, and trust automation decisions, reducing risk rather than introducing it.
Bringing Network Visibility Into the Platform
A significant milestone during 2025 was the introduction of Galileo Network Monitoring. By bringing network telemetry into the same platform as systems and storage data, teams were better able to correlate issues across the full infrastructure stack.
Early deployments focused on simplifying root cause analysis and reducing time spent isolating issues across disconnected tools.
Predictable Pricing in a Market Defined by Cost Uncertainty
One of the clearest takeaways from conversations throughout 2025 was how often pricing complicates observability decisions. Many organizations struggled with observability models that introduced complexity through usage-based pricing, add-on licensing, or unexpected increases as environments scaled.
In contrast, teams value observability platforms that support long-term planning without introducing new financial volatility.
Galileo addressed this challenge with a transparent and predictable pricing model designed to scale predictably as environments change. This reinforced teams’ confidence in using observability data broadly, from daily operations to capacity planning and performance optimization, without creating downstream budget uncertainty.
Observability Gaps and Operational Impact
As observability expectations mature, gaps in coverage and continuity become harder to overlook. When teams lacked historical depth or consistent telemetry, the impact surfaces less as immediate failures and more as operational drag.
In these situations, observability limitations translate into friction rather than incidents. Over time, that friction affects how confidently teams can operate, plan, and communicate. The experience reinforced a practical lesson from 2025: observability that cannot support explanation and continuity limits its own usefulness.
Trust, Explainability, and Accountability
As observability data increasingly informed business decisions, expectations around trust and explainability rose.
Metrics needed to be traceable. Trends needed to be reproducible. Alerts needed historical context. When observability outputs could not support explanation or withstand scrutiny, confidence eroded quickly.
In 2025, successful observability initiatives supported not just operations, but communication and accountability across the organization. Data that could be explained clearly proved far more valuable than data that was merely abundant.
Across organizations, teams that treat observability data as a shared, reliable foundation in 2026 will move with greater speed and confidence than those still reconciling fragmented or short-lived data sets.
Looking Ahead
As infrastructure environments continue to evolve in 2026, observability remains foundational to effective IT operations. The lessons from the past year point toward a clear direction: teams need observability that preserves history, supports explanation, and informs decisions across increasingly complex environments.
Galileo enters 2026 focused on helping teams maintain clarity, reduce uncertainty, and act on data with confidence as expectations around performance, accountability, and efficiency continue to rise.
For a broader view of how these observability lessons fit into overall infrastructure priorities for 2026, you may also find value in ATS Group’s perspective on enterprise infrastructure planning for the year ahead.
