Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

LocalStack lets you run SQS, Lambda, and S3 locally in Docker — but there's a hidden trap: OpenTelemetry's default AWS propagator doesn't work with free LocalStack. Here's how to set up end-to-end local testing with working trace propagation. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

An alert in the middle of the night warns of a potential business failure. Manual incident response becomes more complex due to the overwhelming data from distributed and dynamic digital services. With an SRE agent, your engineering team can cut through alert clutter. They can sort through various signals quicker, decreasing burnout and achieving faster, more affordable resolutions. Operational resilience will see its next evolution with Agentic AI.

SQS doesn't propagate trace context automatically. You instrument both sides, deploy, and get two disconnected traces. This post shows how to wire them into one waterfall — and the ESM format gotcha that silently breaks it every time. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

OpenTelemetry's GenAI instrumentation gives you spans and token counts. It does not give you conversations, workflow cost rollups, or prompts visible in your dashboard. last9-genai is an OTel extension that fills those three gaps — without replacing your existing observability stack. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

Health check endpoints generate thousands of identical, useless spans per day. Here are two production-ready approaches to filter them from your Python OTel traces — and the correctness trap most implementations miss. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

Argo Rollouts exposes Prometheus metrics on port 8090 — but the docs lie about which labels exist. Here's how to scrape them into Last9, build a canary dashboard, and use Last9 as an automated AnalysisTemplate gate, including the auth and base64 gotchas. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

The role of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) is evolving. The focus has shifted from simply working harder during an outage; A new kind of teammate is here to help: the SRE Agent. But what are the key differences when you compare an SRE agent versus a traditional site reliability engineer? This isn’t just a superficial change. It signifies a fundamental alteration in how teams construct and sustain dependable services.

It's 2:47 AM. PagerDuty fires. You open a Slack alert and see: p99 latency spike on checkout-service. You SSH into the host, check dashboards in four tabs, grep logs for the last 20 minutes, and eventually find a slow query introduced in a deploy six hours ago. It took 34 minutes. You resolved it, w Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

> Standard OTel.NET instrumentation captures headers, status codes, and timing — not request or response bodies. Here's how to add body capture to your traces while keeping PHI out of your observability backend. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

GCP's load balancer silently rewrites your traceparent header, orphaning spans in any OTLP backend. Here's the custom propagator that fixes it. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

We've been building the broader incident.io platform for several years now, and one thing we've learned is that UX matters more here than almost anywhere else. When an incident fires, there's no room for poorly designed interfaces or fumbling through features you haven't touched in a while. The product has to be ergonomic: easy to pick up, easy to navigate, with the right things at your fingertips at exactly the right moment. We've put a lot of effort into this over the last 5 years.

Your SLI query shows 100% availability as No Data. Here's why PromQL returns empty results instead of zero — and the label-preserving fix. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

GPU observability isn't one thing - it's eight connected layers from silicon to cost. See why correlation across layers is what cuts debugging from 2 hours to 2 minutes, and why most teams instrument only one or two.

WordPress powers 40% of the web but has no native observability story. Here's how to instrument it end-to-end with OpenTelemetry - PHP, browser RUM, and errors. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

1,000 nodes × 8 GPUs × 60 metrics = 1.4M time series - before you add pod names or Slurm job IDs. GPU monitoring is a cardinality problem disguised as a metrics problem. How to design for it before production OOMs your Prometheus.

Modern site reliability engineering challenges stem from the difficult requirement of confirming why complex systems fail in ways staging cannot replicate. While observability tools signal failures, and AI SREs reason over data, they leave observability gaps regarding the actual state of running code. By utilizing runtime context, teams capture live execution data to accelerate production debugging, resolving incidents in minutes without requiring manual redeploy cycles.

Most teams monitor three GPU metrics - utilization, temperature, memory. There are 50+ that matter, and the ones you skip cause your worst outages. A vendor-neutral guide across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel Gaudi.

60% GPU utilization and 3-second response times? GPU utilization is the wrong signal for LLM inference. Here's why TTFT, KV-cache pressure, and queue depth - not utilization - predict user-facing latency.

Predict GPU hardware failures 48–72 hours in advance. A guide to the five rate-based signals — ECC error trends, XID events, thermal ramp, row remap exhaustion, PCIe downtraining — and how to combine them into a composite health score.

Flat per-token pricing is wrong by 10–50× per request. Prefill vs decode, batch sharing, and cache effects break the math. How to attribute real GPU cost - compute, energy, and dollars - to each inference request.

AI SREs are autonomous systems that handle incident triage, root cause analysis, and remediation by correlating logs, metrics, traces, and code signals. However, as they rely on pre-configured telemetry, the critical execution details of a specific failure, such as variable state and code paths, can often be missed. As a result, they either force users into manual redeploy loops or make inferences from partial data, diagnosing issues using probability rather than proof.

A single second of latency can cost e-commerce sites millions in revenue, while just minutes of downtime trigger customer churn that takes months to recover. Modern users expect instant responses and seamless experiences, making reliability a competitive feature that directly impacts business outcomes. Site Reliability Engineering treats operations as a software problem rather than a manual discipline. SRE applies engineering principles to achieve measurable reliability through automation.

AI SRE tools accelerate incident detection, root cause analysis, and remediation across distributed production systems. They ingest telemetry signals, including logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and deployment history, to correlate anomalies, narrow fault domains, and reduce manual triage. This guide breaks down the top AI SRE tools in 2026 and helps you choose the right one based on your team’s biggest bottleneck, whether that is faster triage, deeper root cause analysis, or runtime-level validation.

Cluster API (CAPI) is transforming how organizations deploy and manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters by introducing declarative, Kubernetes-style APIs to automate cluster provisioning and lifecycle management. While CAPI excels at creating consistent and repeatable cluster deployments across different infrastructure providers, operating it at a massive scale introduces unique day-to-day challenges.

Honeycomb was excited to attend KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, where one theme stood out across sessions: as AI reshapes how software is built and run, teams are being pushed to rethink how they understand their systems. Without strong observability and feedback loops, AI can accelerate confusion, misalignment, and operational risk.