How-To
Distributed tracing: choose the first request path to instrument
Start tracing with a customer-critical path, then test propagation, sampling, and whether the trace supports a real investigation.
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How-To
Read a distributed trace without mistaking it for the whole system
Understand spans, parent-child relationships, retries, and missing evidence so traces support a careful diagnosis.
How-To
Connect the signals with OpenTelemetry
Use instrumentation and context propagation to connect the evidence in an investigation.
News
OpenTelemetry’s Kubernetes milestone matters for AI agent tracing
The stable Kubernetes attributes processor helps connect AI-agent traces to their workloads. Check the metadata joins before upgrading.
AIOps
Use AIOps to shorten the part of incident response that is slow
Locate the delay, choose a bounded intervention, and measure recovery quality alongside elapsed time.
News
Splunk agent observability: follow the work, then the bill
Splunk’s September release connects agent evaluation and cost monitoring. The useful test is whether a responder can trace spending back to an outcome.
AIOps
The operational cost of AI tokens
Account for context limits, retries, latency, and the work behind a useful result.
AIOps
GPU capacity depends on power and cooling
When inference slows without obvious application errors, test physical constraints alongside queueing, workload changes, and software regressions.
SRE
Error-budget template: calculations and release-policy fields
Adapt a complete SLO record, worked budget examples, and an exception log without confusing bad requests with minutes of downtime.
Leadership & Culture
Using ChatGPT at work: check the account, data, and destination
Make a useful AI request without assuming that tool approval, anonymization, or a training opt-out settles every data-handling question.
How-To
Use the 5 Whys without forcing an incident into one cause
Follow evidence through technical failure and incident response, then test whether the proposed correction changes the mechanism.
How-To
Metrics for observability: choose the question before the chart
Counters, gauges, and distributions answer different questions. Build metrics that preserve scope, denominators, and the evidence behind an incident.