Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It's 3am and a complaint has made its way to you: customers can't see product reviews. Nothing has crashed, and no alert points anywhere useful. Somewhere in your stack one service is failing, and the one showing the error is probably not it. Before you can fix anything you have to find it, and that search is most of your night. Now imagine you open the laptop, type one sentence and go grab a coffee. By the time you’re back, the root cause is ready, evidence attached. Your job is to check it.

This September, we hosted a few of our customers at the ilert headquarters in Cologne. The plan was to share where we're heading, have real-life conversations, and give them more room to ask us questions and share their thoughts. ‍ One part of the day was a discussion about on-call culture with some of the greatest minds in SRE (source: they chose ilert as their incident management tool). We asked our customers: what are your top practices for on-call?

Service mesh observability guide: the metrics Istio, Linkerd and Envoy proxies emit, what ambient mode changes, and why tracing still needs app changes. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

MCP server monitoring guide: spans, metrics and logs to record for tool calls, why failed tools look healthy, and how to trace requests from client to server. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

CI/CD observability guide: the OpenTelemetry CI/CD conventions, tracing GitHub Actions and Jenkins runs, queue time, failure vs error, and deploy markers. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

Set up the Prometheus Blackbox Exporter: install it, write HTTP, TCP, DNS and ICMP modules, relabel scrape targets, and alert on probe_success and SSL expiry. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

RAG pipeline observability guide: the spans, attributes and metrics to record for embedding, retrieval, reranking and generation, plus evals for bad answers. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

Azure Functions monitoring guide: platform metrics by hosting plan, why executions go missing in Application Insights, OpenTelemetry setup and alerts. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

Today, we’re introducing Scout 1.0, Datadog’s first AI model specialized for investigating production issues. Scout powers Bits Investigation, our AI SRE. We trained Scout to reduce inference cost so that investigations are cheap enough to run an order of magnitude more often and earlier in an incident’s lifecycle. Key highlights include: Close dialog.

The second edition of the Site Reliability Engineering book reflects the shifts in infrastructure management from AI, microservices, serverless, etc.

The best AI SRE tools to evaluate in 2026 include Sherlocks AI, Resolve AI, Traversal, Cleric, Rootly AI SRE, Komodor Klaudia, Datadog Bits Investigation, and Dynatrace Intelligence. Each addresses a different part of reliability work, from investigating alerts across multiple systems to diagnosing Kubernetes failures or validating production changes. Choosing the right tool starts with a practical question: where does your team lose time during an incident?

Your agent has earned trust in shadow mode. Now it runs on its own: an alert fires, the agent starts, investigates and proposes a fix before anyone opens a laptop. Here is what it takes to make that safe, scalable and better every week. This is the third article in a series on taking an AI SRE agent from a weekend experiment to production. Part 1 built a local, read-only agent on a throwaway cluster and refined it against a synthetic eval set.

HAProxy monitoring guide: the stats page and socket, the built-in Prometheus exporter, the metrics that matter, why queue time averages mislead, and alerts. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

Snowflake monitoring guide: ACCOUNT_USAGE views and their delay, the query and warehouse metrics that matter, idle credits, resource monitors and alerts. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

AWS EKS monitoring guide: free control plane metrics, control plane logs, node health, VPC CNI IP exhaustion, and which alerts to set first. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

GKE monitoring guide: what Google Kubernetes Engine collects by default, which metric packages to turn on, Autopilot limits, and the alerts to set. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

ClickHouse monitoring guide: the Prometheus endpoint, the system tables that explain slow queries, the Too many parts limits, replication lag and alerts. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

Apache Spark monitoring guide: what the Spark UI shows, how to keep it after a job ends, finding skew and spill, Prometheus metrics, and alerts. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

Multi-cloud monitoring guide: why the same metric differs across AWS, Azure and GCP, and how to normalize it with OpenTelemetry into one view. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.

Set up the NVIDIA DCGM Exporter with Docker or Helm, pick the right DCGM metrics, enable profiling counters, map GPUs to Kubernetes pods, and add alerts. Sejal Pandey works on content and growth at Last9, writing about observability, reliability, and SRE practices.