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By Ken Ahrens
Synthetic monitoring has been a critical part of application reliability for years. It gives engineering and operations teams a way to proactively test applications, APIs, and critical customer journeys before users encounter problems. But there is a fundamental limitation with the traditional approach: Someone has to create the tests. As applications become more distributed and customer journeys become more complex, organizations can end up maintaining hundreds or even thousands of synthetic scripts.
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By Matt LeRay
The request timed out after five seconds. The application said context deadline exceeded. The dependency was healthy, its dashboards were green, and its own latency histogram showed nothing above 30 milliseconds.
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By Matt LeRay
Every SRE team operates services it cannot see into: a vendor binary, an inherited legacy deployment, a container whose owning team dissolved two reorgs ago. The routes are undocumented, the dependencies are unknown, and when a request takes 130 milliseconds nobody can say whether that time is application work or a wait across a network boundary.
Sponsored Post
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By Matt LeRay
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. This walkthrough gives the agent two independent witnesses: Together, they turn AI code verification into an experiment with two independent checks.
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By Matt LeRay
A smaller Kubernetes pod can lower allocation cost while completing less work. Green status codes and matching schemas can hide it. This walkthrough combines OpenCost allocation data with proxymock behavior and performance evidence. A candidate passes only when behavior and throughput hold while unit cost falls.
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By Matt LeRay
One API request took 302 milliseconds. Nothing failed. CPU was mostly idle. The response was correct. The trace made the problem obvious: eight inventory calls, each waiting for the previous one. But the trace could not tell me why the application made eight calls, or whether changing their execution would preserve the response. It showed the shape of the wait, not the input that created it.
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By Shaun Duncan
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.
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By Matt LeRay
I spent the day at NVIDIA thinking I’d be learning about all the newest models and RAM throughput achievements. Instead, a version of the future started to crystallize where AI really is good enough, pervasive and cheap(er). Let me share some of my observations and conclusions.
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By Ken Ahrens
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.
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By Alan Mon
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.
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By Speedscale
This video provides a step-by-step demonstration of how to record an application's real-world traffic and generate an automated sandbox environment for debugging and testing.
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By Speedscale
We spend thousands of dollars "token maxing" and running endless debugging cycles just to walk our LLMs through a problem. But is the AI actually failing, or are we just withholding the right environment? Giving your AI assistant its own sandbox to test hypotheses might just be the missing link in your development workflow.
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By 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.
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Continuous Resiliency from Speedscale gives you the power of a virtual SRE-bot working inside your automated software release pipeline. Forecast the real-world conditions of every build, and know you’ll hit your SLO’s before you go to production.
Feed Speedscale traffic (or let us listen) and we’ll turn it into traffic snapshots and corresponding mock containers. Insert your own service container in between for a robust sanity check every time you commit. Understand latency, throughput, headroom, and errors -- before you release! The best part? You didn’t have to write any scripts or talk to anyone!
Automated Traffic Replay for Every Stakeholder:
- DevOps / SRE Pros: Understand if your app will break or burn up your error budget before you release.
- Engineering Leads: Let Speedscale use traffic to autogenerate tests and mocks. Introduce Chaos testing and fuzzing.
- Application Executives: Understand regression/performance, increase uptime and velocity with automation.
Before you go to production, run the projection.