Introduction:

Recently, Gartner released its 2026 Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms report, in which Alibaba Cloud was named a Challenger.

Driven by the comprehensive performance of its CloudMonitor 2.0 across unified observability platform capabilities, AI-driven intelligent diagnostics, and global operations, we believe, Alibaba Cloud demonstrated strong competitiveness in the global observability market.

As enterprises continue to deepen their adoption of the cloud, observability is evolving from a reactive troubleshooting tool into core infrastructure that proactively drives business resilience. A growing number of enterprises are treating observability as a foundational capability for digital transformation, rather than merely a supporting means for IT operations. The normalization of remote collaboration, the widespread adoption of microservices architectures, and the explosive growth of AI applications are together propelling the observability market into a period of rapid growth. Faced with increasingly complex multi-cloud environments and massive volumes of observability data, traditional “siloed” monitoring tools can no longer meet enterprises’ needs for cross-domain correlation analysis.. With the UModel data model at its core, it connects observability data such as metrics, logs, and traces, significantly reducing the operational complexity caused by tool sprawl.

From Observability to Intelligent Operations: STAROps Ushers in a New Stage of Agentic Ops

Observability addresses the problem of "seeing." But as the volume of observability data grows ever larger and microservice topologies keep changing dynamically, “seeing” does not equate to “understanding” or “solving.” Building on the unified data foundation of CloudMonitor 2.0, Alibaba Cloud is evolving UModel toward an IT digital twin and advancing AI agent-driven automated troubleshooting workflows. On this basis, it has further built STAROps, a full-domain intelligent operations platform that extends observability capabilities from data perception to intelligent analysis, autonomous planning, and continuous safeguarding. This establishes a complete closed loop from "seeing the problem" to "solving the problem," further raising the platform’s level of intelligence.

Centered on the four goals of "search fast, understand clearly, pinpoint precisely, and safeguard reliably," STAROps delivers three core capabilities: the Smart Assistant, Long-running Tasks, and Digital Employees. Operations engineers can use natural language to perform cross-domain data queries, log analysis, and alert diagnostics, turning complex queries into instantly readable analytical conclusions. For scenarios such as inspection, log insight, alert aggregation, and application safeguarding, they can create asynchronous tasks spanning days, weeks, and months, moving operations from "after-the-fact response" toward "proactive assurance." STAROps also supports enterprises in customizing their own dedicated SRE agents, distilling runbooks, historical incidents, and expert experience into reusable Skills to form replicable and scalable intelligent operations capabilities. Architecturally, STAROps is built on the UModel operations digital twin, which uniformly models cross-domain data such as metrics, logs, traces, events, topology, and changes. This enables AI to understand, within a single context, the relationships among services, resources, alerts, and changes, completing a full-chain closed loop from root-cause reasoning to impact analysis. Working together with built-in AI operators such as anomaly detection, log clustering, trace analysis, and performance profiling, it reduces the cost of having large models process massive volumes of raw data directly while safeguarding diagnostic efficiency and the stability of results.

In terms of global deployment, Alibaba Cloud’s observability services already cover multiple regions across Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. They support OpenTelemetry-compatible data ingestion and provide multinational enterprises with observability solutions that meet regional compliance requirements. Building on this, STAROps offers enterprise-grade security and compliance safeguards such as RAM access control, manual confirmation of high-risk operations, agent behavior auditing, and end-to-end data encryption, ensuring the controllable operation of agents in production environments.

At the same time, STAROps has officially launched on the Qoder Desktop plugin marketplace. While coding in Qoder, R&D engineers can invoke STAROps directly in natural language to perform online metric queries, log retrieval, distributed tracing, alert diagnostics, and cross-domain root-cause analysis—without switching to an operations monitoring platform and without learning specialized query syntax.

"Observability is moving from 'seeing the problem' to 'solving the problem,' and intelligent operations are moving from 'assisting decisions' to 'autonomous execution.' Going forward, with CloudMonitor 2.0 as the data foundation and STAROps as the intelligent engine, Alibaba Cloud will continue to drive observability from passive monitoring toward proactive, intelligent governance, helping enterprises worldwide build more resilient and more autonomous digital foundations—bringing Agentic Ops truly into production environments and making it accessible to tens of millions of enterprises around the globe," said Jackson Zhou, Head of Alibaba Cloud’s Cloud Native Application Platform.

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, By Padraig Byrne, Martin Caren, D.B. Cummings, Neil Young, 13th July 2026

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