Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Builder in the loop is a Mezmo interview series focused on the engineers, product leaders, and operators shaping AURA, an open-source, MCP-native agent harness for production operations. This installment features Tony Rogers, whose work on AURA is less about building new features and more about trying to break them before users can.

There was a time when “Opus” meant a classical composition and “Sonnet” was fourteen lines of Shakespeare you definitely did not read before the test. Now they’re model tiers, and every new release rewrites the economics of your engineering org whether you’re ready or not. Currently, your monthly total hides the crucial information you need to control and justify AI spend.

TL;DR Choosing the right AI-powered observability platform isn’t about who has the most AI features. It’s about which platform helps your team identify root causes faster and spend less time investigating incidents. Here’s the short version: Logz.io + OrionIQ: Autonomous AI agents investigate incidents, perform root cause analysis, and surface next steps. Open standards, Kubernetes-ready, and deploys in as little as a week.

Making custom Elastic integrations better with both Automatic Import improvements and Integration Skills Elastic 9.4 shipped two tools for building custom integrations: Both are available today.

OpenTelemetry won the architectural standards battle. At scale, though, telemetry breaks more like plumbing than code. It breaks quietly, across a graph, with a blast radius you don’t understand until it’s expensive. With over 65% of organizations now running more than 10 collectors in production, hybrid deployments across Kubernetes and VMs are accelerating fast. Telemetry standardization is no longer a project milestone. It is a baseline expectation.