The News
Ahead of Dynatrace Perform 2026, the company outlined how it is thinking about customer value realization as observability expands deeper into developer workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and AI-assisted operations. The pre-event briefing emphasized adoption metrics, business outcomes, and executive-level ROI framing rather than feature velocity alone.
Analysis
Cost-Aware Engineering Becomes the Default Mode
Application development teams are entering 2026 under a new constraint: speed still matters, but cost visibility and ROI accountability now travel with every tooling decision. theCUBE Research and ECI data shows that while 74% of organizations plan to increase AI/ML spending and 55% expect to invest more in developer tools, only 33% list observability as a top-line budget priority despite its growing role in production reliability and AI operations.
This tension explains why observability platforms are increasingly being evaluated not just as monitoring tools, but as economic control planes. As developers integrate telemetry, AI models, and automation across the SDLC, the question is no longer “what can this tool do?” but “what does it replace, consolidate, or materially improve?”
Observability’s Shift From Coverage to Consumption
One notable theme ahead of Perform is a stronger emphasis on actual usage and adoption metrics( e.g., coverage, utilization, and active use) rather than raw deployment scale. This reflects a broader market correction. Our data shows that nearly 29% of organizations now run between 16 and 20 observability tools concurrently, and 26% cite tool cost growth as a top deployment challenge.
In this environment, platforms that cannot demonstrate sustained developer and operator engagement risk becoming shelfware, regardless of technical sophistication. Measuring adoption inside CI/CD pipelines, IDE workflows, and production incident response loops is emerging as a leading indicator of downstream business value.
ROI Moves Closer to Developer Outcomes
Observability ROI discussions have lived at the infrastructure or operations layer: MTTR reduction, SLA compliance, and uptime metrics. Those remain critical, but they are no longer sufficient. Pre-event messaging suggests a growing focus on developer-adjacent outcomes, such as:
- Faster root cause analysis during deploy-related incidents
- Reduced time spent on post-incident data gathering
- Earlier detection of performance regressions tied to code changes
- Increased automation that frees engineering time for feature work
This aligns with market data showing that 45% of organizations believe they still spend too much time identifying root cause and that further observability investment could materially help.
Executive Framing Reflects a Broader Buying Committee
Another signal worth noting is the emphasis on executive-level ROI narratives. Observability decisions are no longer owned solely by SRE or DevOps teams. IT operations and executive leadership together now influence over 80% of observability spending decisions, with finance and compliance increasingly involved.
This shift helps explain why value realization practices, and not just product capabilities, are becoming more visible. As observability platforms extend into AI operations and developer workflows, buyers are looking for tighter alignment between technical outcomes and business intent, not just higher telemetry volumes.
Why This Matters for Developers
For application developers, this pre-event framing signals a meaningful change in how tooling success will be evaluated in 2026:
- Adoption beats availability: Tools embedded directly into daily workflows matter more than broad platform reach.
- Cost visibility becomes a design constraint: AI-assisted development increases pressure to justify every layer of the stack.
- Observability becomes proactive, not reactive: Preempting failures and automating response is now a core developer productivity lever, not just an ops concern.
Developers should expect observability platforms to be judged increasingly on how well they reduce friction across the SDLC, not just how comprehensively they monitor production.
Looking Ahead
As Perform 2026 approaches, the observability market appears to be entering a more disciplined phase where economic clarity, developer adoption, and business alignment matter as much as technical depth. With over 61% of organizations planning to expand observability investments within the next 24 months, competition will likely intensify around platforms that can credibly link usage to outcomes.
What comes next will hinge on how effectively vendors can translate telemetry and AI into measurable developer and business value, without adding cost opacity or workflow complexity. For developers, this suggests a future where observability is less about watching systems and more about guiding decisions, preventing failure, and making tradeoffs explicit before they hit production.
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