Observability & DevOps

Cisco Systems pushed Splunk AI deeper into tightly controlled enterprise environments with a new AI POD built for on-premises, private-cloud and air-gapped deployments. The validated setup brings together Cisco infrastructure, Nvidia accelerated computing and Kubernetes-based software, letting enterprises run AI workloads without sending sensitive information outside their own environments. Splunk AI Assistant is available now, while Agent Launchpad is scheduled for later this year, and customers can host selected models from Google, OpenAI and Cisco, with Nvidia models expected to follow. Splunk is also adding Tokenomics, a capability designed to track token spending across AI agents and coding tools while estimating future consumption. Cisco shares climbed nearly 3.3% to $111.255 Thursday, though GuruFocus shows the stock trading 49.36% above its GF Value of $74.49, with product pricing and committed customer volumes still undisclosed.

Cisco Systems has pushed Splunk AI deeper into private infrastructure with a new Nvidia-backed AI POD built for self-managed and air-gapped environments. The platform, available now, pairs Cisco infrastructure with Nvidia computing and Kubernetes, while Splunk's Tokenomics tool is designed to track AI spending across agents and employee coding tools and estimate future consumption before the billing cycle closes. Cisco is also widening the commercial opportunity beyond the data center after signing a multiyear agreement with Amazon Web Services to jointly develop security products. Cisco said it received $9.3 billion of hyperscaler AI-infrastructure orders during fiscal 2026, equal to roughly 14.7% of its $63.3 billion annual revenue, though orders are not revenue. Cisco shares were up roughly 0.1% at $110.24.

Cisco Systems is expanding its Splunk portfolio with new artificial intelligence security and observability capabilities after the unit posted double-digit order growth in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. Splunk contributed to several whole-portfolio agreements, added more than 280 customer logos and notched its highest number of competitive wins in any quarter of fiscal 2026, pushing Cisco past its full-year target of adding 1,000 Splunk customer logos. The enhancements include Cisco AI POD for Splunk, expanded AI-agent observability, Tokenomics capabilities and stronger agentic security operations, aimed at helping enterprises deploy, secure and monitor agentic AI at scale. More than 1,500 customers bought newer Cisco security products such as Secure Access, XDR, Hypershield and AI Defense in the fiscal fourth quarter, while the acquisitions of Galileo Technologies and Astrix Securities broaden Cisco's observability and security reach. The push puts Cisco up against Datadog, whose AI offerings include Agent Observability, Agent Console, Data Observability, GPU Monitoring and AI Guard, and CrowdStrike, whose Next-Gen SIEM ending ARR surpassed $695 million and whose Falcon Shield ARR surged more than 185% year over year in the second quarter of fiscal 2027. Cisco shares have appreciated 42.9% year to date, and the Zacks Consensus Estimate for earnings stands at $1.32 per share, implying 32% growth.

Dynatrace announced the launch of a dedicated observability and AIOps practice with Sopra Steria to support European organizations with IT management and regulatory compliance, sending its shares up 3% in the afternoon session. According to a company press release, the initiative initially focuses on clients in France and Norway, helping organizations in key sectors such as financial services and telecommunications manage complex IT environments, and is tailored to assist European enterprises in meeting regulatory compliance frameworks including DORA and NIS2. Adding to the positive momentum, UBS analyst Radi Sultan reiterated a Buy rating and a $65.00 price target on Dynatrace, highlighting a solid growth outlook for the company. The shares closed the day at $55.17, up 3.4% from the previous close. Dynatrace is up 28.6% since the beginning of the year.

Four major infrastructure vendors have now shipped standalone agent governance products at general availability, a rush that has itself become the signal that agent governance is decoupling from individual platforms to become a category of its own. Okta pushed furthest into new territory with its July 2026 product innovations, shipping Agent-to-Agent Connections at general availability to enable secure multi-agent workflows through temporary runtime tokens that enforce which agents may invoke which others, alongside the Agent Gateway, available as a research release, which sits between agents and the systems they access without requiring code changes. IBM's Think 2026 announcement positioned next-generation watsonx Orchestrate as an agentic control plane, introduced in June on AWS and IBM Cloud, offering runtime policy management, credential health monitoring, and an Agent Access overview across an organization's entire agent estate. Broadcom embedded governance directly into the compute fabric with AgentMinder, unveiled at VMware Explore on August 31 and shipping at general availability bundled into the VMware Private AI Cloud, treating agents as enterprise-grade identities bound to a declared mission, permitted intents, approved tools, and authorized resources. Dataiku made a different architectural bet, with Dataiku Agent Management scanning agents across nine platforms including Microsoft Copilot Studio, Salesforce Agentforce, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex to provide a cross-platform control tower for discovery, certification, and audit-readiness. The urgency tracks to two numbers: Menlo Ventures found that 76 percent of AI applications are purchased rather than built internally, and the Cloud Security Alliance reported in February that 84 percent of organizations doubt they could pass a compliance audit focused on agent behavior or access controls.

Devicie announced a major expansion of the application management capabilities within its Intune management and automation platform, automating the operational work of keeping Windows and macOS applications current inside Microsoft Intune. The platform now automatically manages more than 1,500 Windows and macOS applications, alongside an organization's own line-of-business software at no additional charge, with new application versions typically made ready within Microsoft Intune within hours of publisher release. The company cited accelerating update pressure, noting that Microsoft's 8 September 2026 monthly security update addressed more than 950 vulnerabilities in a single release, while Jerry Gamblin's analysis of the CVE List records 1,255 Microsoft CVEs across the whole of 2025, and that Adobe moved from monthly to twice-monthly security bulletins in July 2026. Remediation deadlines have tightened as well, with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in June 2026 replacing its earlier fourteen-day deadline for known exploited vulnerabilities with a tiered directive whose fastest tier is three days. Chief Executive Officer Alex Hesterberg said enterprises cannot meet that pace by adding more manual work and that automation at this speed requires trust. The catalog spans widely used software including Microsoft 365 Apps, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Chrome, Adobe Acrobat, Slack, Zoom Workplace and Mozilla Firefox, and Devicie said John Holland Group runs the enhanced application management in production across more than 60 worksites with $1.2 million in annual return, while Toyota Financial Services moved a 1,300-device fleet to modern management on Intune with Devicie, reducing device builds to 20 minutes.

Copado announced Agentia Headless, a new developer experience that brings governed AI agents directly into the IDE and terminal used by Salesforce developers. The tool, now part of the recently announced Agentia by Copado platform, lets developers operate Copado pipelines, trigger tests and apply existing organizational controls without switching interfaces or becoming AI experts. Copado said one customer had calculated 216 hours of manual pre and post-deployment steps per year across the work of just two release managers before deploying Agentia, while another spent two full weeks on manual regression testing before a single change could reach production, and a CPQ team required 10 days to validate 2,000 product configurations per release. The company said Agentia embeds continuous governance and testing directly into the pipeline, enabling enterprise teams to achieve up to 70% faster releases while reducing production defects. Agentia Headless will be available directly through Copado and its global partner network starting November 2026.

GitLab Inc. reported fiscal second-quarter revenue of $286.3 million, up 21% year over year, with gross bookings reaching a company record and quarterly Net ARR growing more than 40%. Dollar-based net retention was 117%, down from 121% a year earlier, while customers generating more than $100,000 of ARR rose 17% to 1,571 and current remaining performance obligations climbed 20% to $744.7 million. Quarterly operating cash flow was negative $3.1 million versus positive $49.4 million a year earlier, though six-month operating cash flow remained positive at $146.1 million, and the GAAP operating loss widened to $56.9 million, a negative 20% margin, partly on $19.4 million of restructuring charges. Fiscal third-quarter revenue guidance of $281 million to $283 million sits below the latest quarter even as GitLab raised full-year guidance, and the company said Flex could defer up to $13 million of fiscal 2027 revenue into future periods. The article was originally published at Insider Monkey.

Stacklet introduced the Cloud AI FinOps Benchmark, a set of tested controls defining cloud AI cost governance across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The benchmark spans every layer of cloud AI cost, with controls covering GPUs, foundation models, custom models, storage, and token usage thresholds, and is delivered as ready-to-run packs of tested policies that are continuously expanded and adjustable to each team's workflows. Wired into Stacklet's control plane, the same controls that assess a team's posture also remediate it, retiring idle endpoints, pausing stalled training jobs, blocking unapproved models, and alerting when token usage crosses a threshold, with runtime and shift-left coverage that checks Terraform and infrastructure-as-code before deployment. The benchmark is available now, and Stacklet says it is trusted by enterprises managing more than $10 billion in cloud spend, delivering up to 50% reduction in costs and 80% less time spent on governance.

Cloudflare Inc. raised its long-term growth outlook to 50 percent annually from 40 percent at present, sending its shares up 10.51 percent on Wednesday to close at $10.51 apiece. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026, Chief Finance Officer Thomas Seifert said the company is moving beyond a traditional software-as-a-service model to become an agentic AI platform, and that its future opportunity could be much larger than its business, with revenues projected to grow 36 percent year-on-year. In the second quarter, Cloudflare grew revenues 36 percent to $696.1 million from $512 million a year earlier, while its net loss widened 237 percent to $169.98 million from $50.4 million amid a 206 percent higher operating loss. Earlier this month the company partnered with OpenAI on the early launch of Vulnerability Discovery and Remediation, available in early access through Cloudflare Managed Defense, which CEO Matthew Prince said shifts defense strategy from chasing patches one vulnerability at a time to an automated approach. Institutional interest also rose in the second quarter, with 87 hedge funds holding positions in the stock, up from 84 in the prior quarter, and their combined holdings climbing 11.8 percent to $3.97 billion from $3.55 billion.

Fabrix.ai, the AI SRE and Ops company, today launched Governed VibeOps, powered by its purpose-built Argos small language models, turning an enterprise's existing operational stack into a single agentic runtime. The platform connects tools like Splunk, Dynatrace, SolarWinds, Datadog, ServiceNow, Cisco, IBM, and AWS, allowing teams to run out-of-the-box AI agents and vibe-code custom operational apps without rip-and-replace. CEO Raju Datla emphasized that the enterprise has a vibe governance problem, not a vibe-coding problem, as Gartner expects 40% of new enterprise software to be vibe-coded by 2028. Argos SLMs come in three variants—Argos VX, Argos AIOps, and Argos VE—and are about 16 times cheaper than the best mid-size open model and 50 times cheaper than a frontier API, running on local GPUs. A Fortune 500 North American enterprise already runs the platform across a multi-site estate, reporting a seven-figure annual return across NetOps, AppOps, InfraOps, and ServerOps.

Beamr Imaging Ltd. has joined the VAST Cosmos Community as a Technology Partner, collaborating with VAST Data to deliver AI-powered video workflows for broadcasters and content owners. The partnership will debut at IBC 2026 in Amsterdam, September 11–14, with a demonstration combining the VAST AI Operating System, NVIDIA Video Super Resolution, and Beamr's content-adaptive bitrate technology. This workflow enables upscaling of lower-resolution content to 1080p or 4K, with Beamr's encoding reducing file sizes by up to 50% compared to standard encoding. The pipeline also supports modernizing assets to HEVC or AV1 codecs, runs on NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs, and can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises. Beamr CEO Sharon Carmel and VAST Data's John Mao highlighted the economic benefits of enhancing existing media libraries at scale.

NTT DATA, a global leader in AI, digital business and technology services, is expanding deployment of its AI-powered infrastructure operations platform to support complex global enterprise environments, including work with Daimler Truck, one of the largest commercial vehicle manufacturers. The platform combines real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and intelligent automation to enhance operational resilience, efficiency, and visibility. It oversees both local and global environments, unifying service areas and delivering full visibility by monitoring tens of thousands of devices in real time. Capabilities include AI-driven predictive insights to prevent disruptions, automated multi-stage incident processing to reduce downtime, and an AI-orchestrated global delivery model integrating on-site expertise with offshore execution. Abhijit Dubey, CEO and Chief AI Officer of NTT DATA, Inc., highlighted that the platform increases transparency and automation, providing a foundation for greater stability and faster response times.

ControlMonkey, a Cyber Resilience Platform for Cloud Configuration Disaster Recovery, announced expanded configuration backup and recovery for leading security platforms, starting with CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks, with additional platforms coming soon. The new coverage makes critical security policies, rules, and configurations recoverable, addressing the gap where security tools are often missing from recovery strategies. CEO Aharon Twizer emphasized that security configuration needs to be recoverable, not manually rebuilt under pressure. This expansion builds on ControlMonkey's broader platform, which already covers cloud infrastructure, identity, networking, observability, SaaS, and third-party systems, adding a new recovery layer for the security stack.

Kasm Technologies announced the expansion of its partnership with Intel to deliver private, local AI to enterprise users through Kasm AI Workspaces running on Intel Xeon 6 processors with Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). The collaboration positions Kasm as a listed Intel technology partner and combines Kasm's containerized workspace platform with the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit to enable local large language model inference at interactive speeds, with no GPU required and no data leaving the enterprise perimeter. The architecture supports distributed and mixture-of-experts models, such as Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B, which now approach frontier-model capability on common enterprise workloads like chat, retrieval-augmented generation, tool calls, and code assistance. Kasm's platform orchestrates AI workspaces across Intel's full compute portfolio, including CPUs with AMX, integrated NPUs, and discrete GPUs, and Kasm 1.19 supports SR-IOV bifurcation of Intel Arc Pro cards to allow a single physical GPU to serve multiple isolated workspaces. Regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, legal, defense, and government have been early adopters, with the architecture reaching cost parity with per-seat AI subscriptions at approximately 40 provisioned users per node and inverting favorably above that threshold.

Palo Alto Networks has reportedly explored acquisitions of Datadog and Okta in recent years, signaling that CEO Nikesh Arora is willing to consider large deals as the cybersecurity company expands beyond its traditional security platform. The talks went nowhere, but they highlight how aggressively Palo Alto may pursue observability, identity, and AI-security assets to broaden its product ecosystem. According to The Information, Arora met repeatedly with Okta CEO Todd McKinnon between late 2024 and early 2025, but discussions broke down over price. Arora also met Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel in spring 2025, but Pomel was reportedly not interested, and the discussions never progressed to a formal offer. Arora is now reportedly looking at products that could complement Chronosphere, including areas served by Cribl and ClickHouse, and is also evaluating possible AI-security deals. Datadog shares rose 2.9% Wednesday following the report.

Temporal Technologies is reportedly in talks to raise about $500 million at a valuation exceeding $12 billion, according to Bloomberg. The company, founded in 2019 by Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, provides durable execution infrastructure that lets AI agents recover from crashes, timeouts, and long human approvals. Temporal counts OpenAI, Netflix, Datadog, Emergent, Salesforce, Replit, and Retool among its customers, and reports 380% year-over-year revenue growth. It raised $300 million in a Series D on February 17, 2026, at a $5 billion pre-money valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing total funding to about $650 million. The new round is not closed and terms could change, with the lead investor undisclosed.

Extreme Networks reported fourth-quarter fiscal 2026 revenue of $338.6 million, up 10.3% year over year, driven by demand for its AI-powered cloud networking platform. Full-year revenue reached $1.28 billion, a 12.6% increase, while non-GAAP earnings per share rose 26% to $1.06. The company guided fiscal 2027 revenue between $1.38 billion and $1.4 billion and non-GAAP EPS between $1.28 and $1.33. SaaS annualized recurring revenue grew 18% to $244.3 million, and the company repurchased $87 million in stock during the year.