AIOps

Agentic AI is the next stage of network operations, but it is not a permission slip to let a chatbot push configs into production. In 2026, the practical model is AI agents that triage, validate, and optimize from live telemetry while humans keep control of guardrails, approvals, and blast radius. According to Gartner via PagerDuty (2025), 70% of enterprises will deploy agentic AI agents to operate infrastructure by 2029, and according to Cisco (2026), Agentic Workflows already executed more than 165,000 times in the last 30 days. ...

IBM closed its $11.4 billion acquisition of Confluent on March 17, 2026, making it the largest data infrastructure deal in recent memory and putting the Apache Kafka company at the center of IBM’s enterprise AI and hybrid cloud strategy. For network engineers, this isn’t just a Wall Street headline — Confluent’s streaming platform is the infrastructure layer that powers real-time network telemetry, AIOps pipelines, and the event-driven architectures that make intent-based networking actually work. ...

A network digital twin is a virtual replica of your production network that lets you test configuration changes, simulate failure scenarios, and validate routing behavior before anything touches a live device. In 2026, the technology has matured from a concept that sounded futuristic into a practical tool that any network team can start building with open-source software. Key Takeaway: You don’t need a six-figure vendor platform to start building a network digital twin — Batfish, ContainerLab, and Suzieq are free, open-source tools that cover config analysis, topology emulation, and observability. Start at Level 1 and build up incrementally. ...