Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AI SRE is having a moment. The category pulled in massive funding rounds over the last two years, Gartner published its first market guide, and vendors are promising everything from 90% faster resolution to fully autonomous incident response. If you run an engineering organization, someone has probably pitched you an AI SRE in the last quarter. And let’s be honest: faster triage, less alert fatigue, and automated frontline response are wins for understaffed teams.

Imagine if your workday started as soon as you woke up. Before you can even start your coffee maker, email alerts are flooding in, coworkers are pinging you on Slack, and your phone is buzzing nonstop with reminders. You haven’t even pulled the covers back, and your boss is asking you about deliverables. This is what Kubernetes pods deal with every day. Unless, that is, you use readiness probes.

Dynatrace gives engineering teams deep, real-time visibility into every service they run. That visibility is the foundation of every effective reliability practice, and it's exactly the foundation Gremlin is built to extend. Once you can see how your distributed systems behave today, the next step is knowing how they'll behave under failure tomorrow—and to do it before those failures happen.

Cloud resilience often feels like an uphill battle. When you’re overseeing hundreds of applications across different providers, identifying potential failure points manually is nearly impossible. You’re left trying to find the needle in a haystack—a needle that could take down your entire application at any moment. To truly protect your uptime, you have to break the cycle of reactive troubleshooting.

Reliability guardrails help make sure that your applications stay reliable without slowing down. In an earlier blog, we went into why agentic AI development needs reliability guardrails. It went over how the increased speed of AI development demands automated guardrails to verify resilience and what kinds of tests these guardrails should cover. But that’s only the beginning. By themselves, guardrails act as a gate to ensure resilience mechanisms hold under rapid changes.

AI has massively accelerated code deployment. In fact, since the introduction of agentic coding, GitHub has seen exponential growth in PRs, commits, and new repos. What they originally predicted would require 10X capacity, they’re now estimating it’s going to require 30X capacity, and the biggest driver is agentic development. Companies across industries are building agentic pipelines to ship features faster than ever before. That acceleration isn’t without risk.

Artificial intelligence recently took a major leap from “saying” to “doing.” Instead of simple back-and-forth chats, we’re now allowing automated AI processes to take action on our behalf—from responding to emails to building and deploying complete applications. This shift from “assistant” to “actor” can make applications more capable, but it also creates additional failure modes.

There’s a common saying: “A backup isn’t a backup until you’ve tested it.” The same is true whether it’s a simple database failover or an entire data center/cloud provider failover. You simply won’t know if it works if you don’t test it. When it comes to disaster recovery testing, that can be an expensive, painful, and arduous process. But it’s required by companies for a reason. And not just for disasters like hurricanes, flooding, or earthquakes.

Today, we’re launching a new approach to running disaster recovery tests, validating failover processes, and ensuring compliance with regulations such as DORA. With Disaster Recovery Testing, you can run zone, region, and datacenter-scale experiments across your entire Gremlin organization simultaneously. ‍

Did you know the third week of January is the most common time for people to fail New Year’s Resolutions? It doesn’t matter whether it’s exercising more, learning a new language, or just trying to drink less coffee, that initial surge of fresh New Year’s energy is fading, and if you want to make a resolution stick, this is the key time to make a lasting change. The same is true with any reliability resolutions you might have made.