Summary Bullets:

• Innovative dev tools extend capabilities to include observability.

• Operations teams will see a boost in GenAI-injected operational workflows.

According to GlobalData’s latest report on 2026 predictions, observability providers will make a big push into DevOps. The industry’s platform providers will focus greater investment in the coming year in providing operations teams with AI-generated capabilities that streamline the critical application deployment portion of the application lifecycle, known for being the most complex piece of app modernization.

Developer teams and ops teams will be more closely aligned in their ability to access innovative generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI technologies to get their respective jobs done as part of the app development and app deployment process. In 2025, much of the investments made by large language model (LLM) providers focused on advanced AI tools and platforms aimed at advanced coding and refactoring legacy apps. Ops teams will have access to more AI-injected capabilities, especially as part of evolving observability solutions.

Observability companies such as Chronosphere and systems integrators such as Thoughtworks are demonstrating these newer concepts, supporting the notion of accelerated AI adoption, agile software development, continuous delivery, and app modernization including streamlining legacy system modernization. Thoughtworks supports improved operational provisioning using AI agents through the Thoughtworks ‘AI/works’ platform.

Also within the DevOps realm, GlobalData is predicting up-and-coming app-development-tools start-ups will have a disruptive impact on the observability market segment as a whole by increasingly offering observability capabilities as part of their portfolios.

These little-known companies actually work closely with the hyperscalers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. The cloud giants are happy to leverage the tools of these technology partners for their ability to simplify the process of adopting and configuring their platform services which can be numerous and complex to adopt. Some of these start-ups, such as LocalStack are closely associated with hyperscalers’ roadmaps (in this case, with AWS). LocalStack’s local cloud development tools include observability capabilities, which display data exchanged at each stage of the app lifecycle, providing visibility of event flows. The tools also centralize debugging through event replay with detailed analysis and troubleshooting, among other features.