Skip to main content

The Forrester Wave™: XDR Platforms, Q2 2026

Access report
About usPartnersSupport|Log in
Elastic logo
Start free trialContact sales

Elastic is a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™ for AIOps Platforms, Q4 2026

Open architecture, explainable AI, and full context

By
Natalie Blake

Elastic was named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: AIOps Platforms, Q4 2026, which evaluated 10 providers across 24 criteria. Forrester gave Elastic the highest possible scores in five criteria: algorithmic trust and explainability, observability as code (OaC) and GitOps alignment, AI stack and semantic observability, sovereign deployment and data isolation, and pricing flexibility and transparency. We believe these strengths support how we built AIOps into an AI SRE that shows its evidence, learns from every investigation, and finds what alerts miss.

Why incident response needs a different kind of help

In our view, the AI conversation in operations has moved on from whether a model can propose a root cause. The question teams ask now is whether they can rely on the answer. Telemetry keeps growing, code is generating code, and AI-based components make failures harder to predict. We believe the answer comes down to transparency, learning, context, and openness. Here is what sets our approach apart.

Trust starts with evidence

An AI recommendation is only as reliable as an engineer’s ability to check it.

We built Elastic nightshift AI SRE as an always-on AI coworker that investigates like an engineer. It lays out its reasoning, what data it looked at, which explanations it considered, and what evidence supports the conclusion. SRE teams can follow the investigation from the start and confirm it before they approve an action.

Context that stays complete

AI can only reason over the data it can reach. Many teams cut telemetry to control costs, which means the evidence an investigation needs may no longer exist when the incident arrives. In our view, teams shouldn’t have to choose between affordability and fast, accurate incident resolutions. Elastic is built with cost-efficient storage for logs, traces, and metrics so they can keep all their data in one place and give AI the full picture to work from. What’s more, Elastic distills what’s actually relevant about the environment into compact context for the SRE agent to reason over, improving both accuracy and token-efficiency.

AI that learns and looks ahead

Each investigation should leave the system better informed. Elastic’s AI SRE carries what it learns from past incidents into the next one, so a problem that returns is recognized sooner and its recommendations improve over time.

Detection based on alerts only covers failures that can be predicted. Elastic is built for the incidents that break your assumptions, surfacing what else deserves attention, including the unknown unknowns that you can’t write a rule for.

Open standards that keep your options open

Observability tooling changes quickly, and closed stacks make every change expensive. Elastic is open by design and built on OpenTelemetry. We keep data in its native form, so teams can adopt new instrumentation without rebuilding pipelines or translating schemas. The investment in your data holds up as the ecosystem moves.

What this recognition means to us

We believe being named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: AIOps Platforms, Q4 2026 reflects what engineers want from AI in operations: answers they can verify, context that isn’t limited by what they can afford to store, and the freedom to build on open standards.

These connect: efficient storage makes complete context possible, complete context makes AI investigations accurate, transparent reasoning makes them checkable, and open standards keep the investment portable.

Read the full report

The Forrester Wave™: AIOps Platforms, Q4 2026 is now available. Read the report.

Explore how Elastic nightshift AI SRE puts AI agents to work on investigation, processing telemetry in real time and correlating logs, metrics, and traces to surface likely causes, while your engineers verify the evidence and approve the action.

Learn more about how customers use Elastic Observability for AI-powered infrastructure operations. 

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.

Sign up for Elastic Cloud free trial

Spin up a fully loaded deployment on the cloud provider you choose. As the company behind Elasticsearch, we bring our features and support to your Elastic clusters in the cloud.

Start free trial