Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

speedscale

Flamegraphs Find It. Replay Proves It.

Jul 31, 2026 By Matt LeRay In Speedscale
I made an API endpoint 13 times faster. Then I realized my first verification only checked the status, headers, and response schema. I had not checked the totals. I had made the bug faster. That is the problem with giving an AI coding agent one kind of evidence. A CPU profile can show where the application is slow, but not whether an optimization preserves behavior. A traffic replay can prove that behavior stayed stable, but not explain why the code burns CPU.
Read Post
squared up

The best ways to visualize API responses in 2026

Jul 31, 2026 By Blog In Squared Up
APIs power almost everything we use today, from cloud platforms and monitoring tools to ticketing systems and internal applications. But no matter how useful an API is, the response usually arrives as raw JSON. That's perfectly fine for machines, but much less convenient for people. Whether you're debugging an endpoint, exploring a new service, or building dashboards for your team, you'll probably want a better way to visualize that data. Fortunately, there are several ways to visualize API responses.
Read Post
checkly

CLIs are more token-efficient than MCP. Or are they?

Jul 30, 2026 By Stefan Judis In Checkly
MCP servers have a reputation: they eat your context window. CLIs paired with skills, on the other hand, are more token efficient. But is this still true? I dropped all my MCP servers five months ago. Five months is a long time in AI land. When Anthropic came up with the concept of skills, many people stopped using MCP servers in favor of CLI tooling and skills.
Read Post

Stop Writing Log Lines: Use eBPF to Catch PII and Credentials

Jul 30, 2026 By Speedscale In Speedscale
Tired of out-of-control log expenses and manual logging discipline? Discover next-generation observability with Speedscale. By using eBPF to record full-fidelity data right off the wire, you can instantly run full-text searches, track down leaking PII, and securely map out credentials across HTTP, Postgres, gRPC, and more—all without writing a single log line. Learn more: speedscale.com.
View Video
speedscale

eBPF: Preventing Garbage HTTP Payloads When Reading Kernel Scatter-Gather Buffers

Jul 28, 2026 By Shaun Duncan In Speedscale
Recently someone on our team opened a traffic snapshot and found an HTTP request that was captured with our eBPF capture agent, nettap. Our protocol dissector parsed most of the response correctly, but that correctness ended once the response headers were processed. What they ended up with was a recording of an HTTP request/response where the response body was just an incorrect collection of garbage binary data when it should have been JSON text.
Read Post
speedscale

Two confident fixes missed this production bug

Jul 24, 2026 By Ken Ahrens In Speedscale
Every new signup posts a message to our Slack. The format is dull and reliable: Overnight this week one arrived like this: That trailing nothing was the entire incident. No error logs, no alerts. A returning user had signed up, our signup service had attached them to a tenant we deprovisioned back in December, and the only symptom in the whole company was a Slack message that ran out of words.
Read Post
cloudzero

Shipped: API key scopes, grouped by what they actually do

Jul 24, 2026 By Kaitlin Woo In CloudZero
Creating an API key used to mean sorting through categories organized around our internal structure, not how you’d use them, so finding everything you needed for a specific job meant guessing, or having someone on our team walk you through it. Now you can tell what each permission actually does at a glance.
Read Post
speedscale

Imaginary Test Data. Real Token Bill.

Jul 23, 2026 By Alan Mon In Speedscale
Ask an AI for K-pop concert advice without saying the group, city, date, or budget. It may confidently send you to a BLACKPINK tribute night in Cleveland with a $400 resale ticket. The AI was plenty confident. It just had nothing real to go on. That is exactly what happens when developers test AI applications with invented traffic. The test may look reasonable. The result may even pass.
Read Post

Instant Kubernetes Observability with Proxymock #speedscale #kubernetes #ebpf #devops #cloudnative

Jul 21, 2026 By Speedscale In Speedscale
Learn how to get instant observability into your Kubernetes cluster by installing the Speedscale operator and proxymock tool. In this step-by-step tutorial, we walk you through setting up the operator to capture live network traffic (including encrypted traffic, API calls, and database calls) without complex instrumentation or manual configuration.
View Video

New AI Features in Playwright (Live-Webinar)

Jul 17, 2026 By Checkly In Checkly
An AI agent that can't open a browser is just guessing. Stefan from Checkly shows how giving AI coding agents a real browser via Playwright enables reliable end-to-end test generation and debugging, closing the quality gap created by faster, AI-driven shipping. The session compares Playwright MCP vs the Playwright CLI for agent workflows, showing that thanks to MCP spec changes, lazy tool loading, and skills, the two are now effectively just different interfaces to the same tool, with no real token advantage either way.
View Video
5 Best Video Caption Generation APIs for Developers

5 Best Video Caption Generation APIs for Developers

Jul 17, 2026 By OpsMatters In OpsMatters
Adding captions to video at scale is a lot harder than it looks. The best video caption generation APIs have to handle accent diversity, timestamp drift, multilingual rendering, and real-time processing all at once, and most developers don't realize how challenging that gets until something breaks in production. After reviewing the leading platforms in this space, one thing became clear: the gap between a generic transcription tool and a purpose-built captioning API is huge. This guide covers five of the strongest options available right now, comparing their technical depth, pricing, and real-world fit.
Read Post
From OpenAPI to MCP: A Practical Access Layer for AI Clients

From OpenAPI to MCP: A Practical Access Layer for AI Clients

Jul 16, 2026 By OpsMatters In OpsMatters
Connecting an AI client to a REST API looks simple until the first real production requirement appears. The client needs to discover operations, understand request schemas, authenticate safely, respect write restrictions, and handle credentials without copying them into every desktop configuration. A thin wrapper around HTTP rarely solves all of those problems.
Read Post

AI is Exposing Observability's Dirty Secret

Jul 14, 2026 By Speedscale In Speedscale
The 3 pillars of observability are breaking. For years, dev teams relied on Logs, Metrics, and Traces to know when something went wrong. But now? AI agents are writing, deploying, and changing code in real-time. When an AI hallucination pushes a bug to production, standard monitoring sees nothing wrong.To survive the AI era, we need a 4th Pillar of Observability. Watch to find out what it is and why the old way of monitoring just became obsolete.
View Video
Sponsored Post
speedscale

Fixing 403 auth errors when you replay traffic

Jul 13, 2026 By Ken Ahrens In Speedscale
Trigger warning: this one is about Java, authentication, and Docker Compose files. If that is not your thing, I am sorry, but they are part of life and they are honestly not that hard to work with. Everything here is open source on our GitHub repo, so you can follow along. Recording an authenticated Java flow, replaying it, hitting the dreaded 403, and fixing it with a proxymock recommendation.
Read Post
checkly

How Upstash Monitors Every Redis Replica with Checkly

Jul 10, 2026 By Ilter Kavlak In Checkly
There's a support ticket every SRE dreads: "is something wrong with my database?" The outage is bad enough. Worse is the possibility that the customer knew first. At Upstash, we treat that scenario as two failures rather than one: the incident itself, and the uptime monitoring gap that let a customer beat us to it. We write a postmortem for the gap, too.
Read Post
speedscale

AI writes code in seconds, but delivery still takes days

Jul 9, 2026 By Ken Ahrens In Speedscale
The pitch for AI coding was speed. Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, whatever you’re running, they all generate business logic faster than you can review it. That part is real. But look at what happens after the code gets written and the numbers get ugly. CircleCI’s 2026 State of Software Delivery Report found AI drove a 59% increase in average throughput.
Read Post

How to Trace Microservices WITHOUT OpenTelemetry

Jul 9, 2026 By Speedscale In Speedscale
Learn how to trace complex multi-hop transactions across microservices when OpenTelemetry isn't available or trace parents get lost. This quick tutorial demonstrates how to use full-text search in proxymock (a free CLI and UI tool) to isolate user journeys (like looking up a specific username) and instantly generate waterfall tracing views. Whether you are working locally or in a Kubernetes cluster, you can record API traffic, visualize multi-hop requests, and easily transition those captures into load or regression tests.
View Video
cloudzero

GPT-4 API cost 2026: pricing breakdown and how to estimate it

Jul 6, 2026 By Lyne Carolyne In CloudZero
GPT-4 API pricing spans $0.10 to $30.00 per million input tokens across the model family. GPT-4.1 is the current recommended production model at $2.00 input / $8.00 output per million tokens. Legacy GPT-4 still runs at $30.00/$60.00 per million tokens -- 15x more expensive for no meaningful quality gain. For finance and engineering leaders accountable for AI spend, choosing the right GPT-4 variant is the single biggest cost lever on your bill.
Read Post
speedscale

The API tests passed. The database didn't.

Jul 4, 2026 By Matthew LeRay In Speedscale
We shipped v2 of a small products API on a Thursday. Green CI. Green replay. The new search endpoint worked. I went home feeling competent. Friday morning I ran the same traffic against both builds with proxymock and compared the SQL. v2 had added 80 queries on the same HTTP script. A per-product audit COUNT was firing inside the list handler. A startup migration had run ALTER TABLE and CREATE TABLE audit_log. Total DB time was up 70 ms on a demo that should have been boring.
Read Post
speedscale

Trace without traces

Jul 2, 2026 By Matthew LeRay In Speedscale
A customer emailed on a Tuesday: checkout hung for ten seconds. I opened our tracing tool, punched in the time window, and got nothing. The trace was sampled out. We keep 1% of traces, like most shops with real traffic do. The one request that actually mattered was in the 99% we threw away. I spent twenty minutes admiring our observability stack before admitting it couldn’t answer a first-grader’s question: what happened to this person? Here’s what I know now.
Read Post
checkly

Autoscaling Checkly Private Location Agents in Kubernetes with KEDA

Jul 2, 2026 By Edvinas Janusevicius In Checkly
Monitoring load is not always steady. A team might add a new batch of checks or run several ad hoc tests during a rollout. When that happens, your Private Location agents need to pick up more work at once. If there aren’t enough agents available during a burst, checks start piling up in the queue, which can delay or disrupt check execution. But solving this by running a high number of agents around the clock has the opposite problem: most of that capacity sits idle until the next busy period.
Read Post
cloudzero

OpenAI API cost calculator: estimate your GPT spend before it estimates you

Jul 2, 2026 By Lyne Carolyne In CloudZero
This OpenAI API cost calculator (also an AI inference calculator for o3/o4-mini thinking tokens) estimates your monthly OpenAI API pricing bill from three inputs: model, request volume, and average tokens per request. Toggle between standard, batch, and cached pricing and get your number in seconds. It also shows what the same workload costs on Claude and Gemini. For the full per-model rate card, see CloudZero's OpenAI API pricing guide.
Read Post

AI Agents Write Broken Code 49% of the Time #speedscale #AI #Coding #Tech #DevOps

Jul 1, 2026 By Speedscale In Speedscale
AI agents write broken code nearly 50% of the time. By adding a traffic-based deterministic evaluation, Speedscale boosted unsupervised bug-fixing quality from 51% to 77% in just 5 minutes. This helped slash token costs and eliminate rework without human intervention. Learn more: speedscale.com.
View Video

Copyright © 2026 OpsMatters™. All rights reserved.