Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

How many times has your team stared at a dashboard, pointed to a spike, and asked a question that charts alone can’t answer? “What was the real impact of that deployment?” “Why are our Kubernetes pods in the us-east-1 cluster suddenly crashing?” “Are we wasting money on overprovisioned servers?” Answering these questions is the real work of operations and SRE.

The rate at which vulnerabilities are being exploited is on the rise. The VulnCheck company, which specializes in vulnerability intelligence, found that in Q1 2025, 28.3% of vulnerabilities were exploited within 1 day of CVE disclosure. Keeping your systems up to date is more important than ever. The reality is that many security teams are running scans and then exporting to giant spreadsheets, which are “tossed over the wall” to the Operations team with little context.

The 2 AM pager alert. For anyone in Ops, SRE, or IT administration, those words trigger a familiar sense of dread. An alert has fired. Is it a real fire, or another false alarm waking you from a dead sleep? The pressure is on. Every minute of downtime costs money and reputation, but troubleshooting a complex system when you’re sleep-deprived is a Herculean task.

It’s no longer theoretical – artificial intelligence has left research labs and entered production systems, generating a new breed of consumers – autonomous and intelligent agents. These autonomous AI agents are increasingly interacting with real-world APIs (application programming interfaces), which are sets of protocols and tools for building and integrating software applications.

Your Jaeger setup is running. Traces are coming in, and the UI is helping you spot slow services or debug broken flows. But just like any part of your observability stack, Jaeger needs some basic monitoring to stay reliable. If the collector starts queueing spans or the agent runs out of buffer, it can lead to dropped traces, sometimes without any obvious sign in the UI. This blog focuses on the operational side of Jaeger.