As AI workloads move into production, new Dynatrace research shows reliability teams are gaining outsized responsibility — and new blind spots.
Dynatrace, the AI-powered observability company, on Aug. 27 released findings from its State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026 report, examining how enterprises are using observability, automation and AI to scale site reliability engineering and platform engineering.
The global survey of 919 IT leaders found that rapid AI adoption is redefining what these teams are responsible for, forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation and control. Gartner projects that 80% of enterprises will adopt SRE practices by 2028, up from just 30% in 2024.
The report found that 67% of site reliability engineers, or SREs, now name AI model monitoring as their top use case, and that monitoring for model performance and accuracy is already the most common AI-powered capability among SREs, at 58%. Yet respondents said AI is falling short on cost reduction and mean time to resolution, or MTTR, and more than a third of platform engineers cited tool integration as their biggest barrier.
Those findings, Dynatrace said, are part of why the company recently announced its intent to acquire Arize, an AI evaluation startup. The acquisition is meant to bring AI-native evaluation directly into Dynatrace’s observability platform, so teams building AI models and those operating them in production work from the same data rather than maintaining separate systems.
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Scale Is the Next Challenge
The study found SRE and platform engineering practices are now well established in large enterprises: 92% of organizations reported executive support for SRE initiatives, and 89% of organizations practicing platform engineering have implemented an internal developer platform, with 60% reporting broad adoption across departments. Seventy-three percent of SRE and platform engineering teams now collaborate and share responsibilities across both domains.
AI Raises the Bar for Oversight
Agentic AI is introducing new priorities, according to the report. Eighty-nine percent of SREs use service-level objectives, or SLOs, across at least some teams or systems, while 55% of platform engineers said their priority is equipping developers with AI-powered tools such as coding copilots and chatbots.
While respondents said AI is generally meeting expectations for improving reliability and developer productivity, it is delivering less impact than expected on lowering costs and reducing MTTR — a gap the report says points to the need for greater system-level intelligence and workflow orchestration, rather than simply layering AI tools onto existing environments. Nearly half of SREs said too many data sources and metrics make it difficult to define and manage effective SLOs.
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Observability as the Control Plane
The report identifies observability as an emerging foundation for AI governance and reliability, though integration and fragmented data remain barriers: 37% of platform engineers cited integrating with existing tools and systems as their top challenge, and only 40% said they embed observability across all deployment stages.
Half of SREs now use AI-powered capabilities for automated incident response — a shift, the report says, toward agentic operations in which observability increasingly governs when and how autonomous actions are taken.
“SRE and platform engineering laid the groundwork for modern digital reliability, but AI is rewriting the rules,” said Steve Tack, Dynatrace’s chief product officer. “Enterprises need to now move from managing systems to orchestrating them, connecting observability, automation, and agentic AI to operate at the speed these initiatives demand, turning insight into action at scale. This research also reflects why we recently announced our intent to acquire Arize. AI engineering teams have been evaluating in one set of tools while operations teams monitor in another, and that gap is no longer sustainable as AI moves deeper into enterprise production.”
The report is based on a global survey of 919 senior IT leaders and decision-makers involved in SRE, platform engineering or IT operations at enterprises with annual revenue of $500 million or more. It was conducted by Qualtrics partner Y2 on behalf of Dynatrace between October 2025 and January 2026, with respondents from the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific.
