Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Assisted, Augmented or Agentic? Choose Your Splunk Starting Point

Episode two of Beyond the Thread explores how organizations can leverage a solid data foundation for AI-driven actions. Hosted by Courtney Wright and featuring experts Greg Ainsley-Malik and Sonal Pardeshi, the discussion delves into the Cisco Data Fabric, powered by the Splunk platform, and its role in transforming machine data into actionable insights. The episode highlights the journey towards agentic operations, addressing the challenges faced in moving from AI-ready data to effective implementations, and examines different adoption strategies that organizations may pursue.

Introducing Infrastructure Knowledge: Teach Netdata AI What Your Metrics Can't Show

Netdata AI sees everything your infrastructure does: every metric, every anomaly, every alert. It does not see what your infrastructure is: which services matter, which host is supposed to run hot, who owns what, what your team considers normal. Without that context, “CPU at 91%” is just a finding. With it, it might be a machine doing exactly its job.

Wide Events vs. Three Pillars: AI Observability Costs

As agentic AI workflows gain traction within organizations, those organizations are asking how to account for their behavior while keeping costs manageable. Some are sticking with the old three pillars of observability approach: take a measurement to create a metric, record output to a log, and track serial progress with a trace. Each of these is useful, but treating them as distinct formats from the start means paying for them distinctly too. Separate storage doesn't come cheap.

I use Claude every day. I still build dashboards in SquaredUp

If you've looked at SquaredUp and thought "I don't need this, I'll just use Claude", I understand completely. I've thought it too. Here's what changed my mind. I use Claude constantly. I've also spent the last few months building the parts of SquaredUp that let it in: our MCP server, the object graph and correlation, a stack of plugins. So this isn't a dashboard vendor being sniffy about AI. I've watched Claude pull from several sources and produce something genuinely useful in under a minute.

Two cats, two dogs, four vendors, and the model the AI couldn't find (Tech Talk Companion)

Tech Talks went dark for a few months, and on episode 13 I finally got to ask why. Mathias Palmersheim’s answer, delivered completely straight, was that his users were unhappy with the availability and usability of their feeders and their litter box, and he wasn’t allowed back on stream until that got fixed. The users are two dogs and two cats, and they have titles. Maisie, a Shiba Inu who came to him through a rescue, is the recently promoted chief executive pawofficer.

Prompts, skills, and the AGENTS.md nobody wants to write (and how Anthropic writes theirs)

You’ve watched Claude Code compact a conversation. The context bar fills, it pauses, a summary appears, and it carries on like nothing happened. You probably assumed a housekeeping script trimmed the transcript in the background. It didn’t. The model compacted itself. When the window fills, Claude Code sends a long, specific prompt telling the model how to summarize its own conversation. Then it does, same model, same turn. The thing managing your context window is just another instruction.

AI cost calculator: estimate your total spend

An AI cost calculator for the whole wallet adds four lanes: seats and subscriptions, API and token usage, cloud AI services, and GPU infrastructure. Average 2026 totals run $25 per employee per month at light adoption, $100 to $150 at active adoption, and $300 or more at AI-heavy companies. Getting to your number takes four lane subtotals and three corrections.

Agent vs Agentless Monitoring and How to Decide What Goes Where

Why does half the infrastructure end up returning no monitoring data? The standard plan is to install collection software on everything, which moves quickly across servers and stops dead at the first device running closed firmware. Storage arrays, firewalls, and switches will never accept an install, and the rollout stalls there. That plan usually gets set once for the whole environment, with a single collection model applied to hardware it was never suited for.