Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Making an SRE agent available in Slack sounds straightforward until you start thinking about what that agent can access. If it's connected to Kubernetes, you need to consider how Slack communicates with the agent, what infrastructure the agent can inspect, and who can ask it to do something. Making operational tools easier to use shouldn't mean exposing another service or giving everyone unrestricted access to production.

If you're using agents and MCPs to get a better understanding of your environment or work through an investigation, you can get a lot of useful information back. You can pull logs, look at recent changes, and check how services are configured, but you're still the one deciding what to do with all of it. That part of the process still lives in your head. To see where Jev might fit, look at decisions your team already makes and work backwards from them.

Authored by Greg Janco, Engineering Manager at Mezmo I've always thought there was something backwards about incident response. An alert fires at 3 a.m. PagerDuty does its job. Somebody wakes up, grabs a laptop, connects to the VPN, opens the alert, and then starts answering the same basic questions we ask at the beginning of almost every incident. What changed? What else is broken? Have we seen this before? Some of those need a human eventually. A lot of the first pass doesn't.

Authored by Sven Delmas, VP of Research at Mezmo I wanted to know what Mezmo's new trace features feel like with real telemetry behind them, so I built the smallest honest rig I could: the OpenTelemetry demo application running in a local Kubernetes-in-Docker cluster on my machine, one collector, and one deliberately simple Mezmo pipeline.

Builder in the loop is a Mezmo interview series with the engineers, product leaders, and operators shaping AURA. Each installment looks past the product layer to explore the decisions, tradeoffs, and lessons involved in building agents for real production work. This installment features Mike Shearer, the engineer who built AURA and, until recently, its only developer. AI agents are easy to believe in when the task is small.

‍ Most of the AI features that shipped into observability tools this year summarize alerts. You get a paragraph that restates the dashboard you were already looking at, and the agent never reads the cluster itself, because giving it cluster access is a security conversation nobody wanted to start. This walkthrough starts it.

Software systems are getting better at understanding themselves. The mix of richer telemetry, smarter pipelines, and agentic AI is shifting observability from a passive record of events into something more active and useful. That shift is what we mean by context engineering. We recently partnered with O’Reilly on a report by David Beale that introduces the discipline. Before you read it, here are five things worth knowing.

AI has changed how software gets built. It hasn't changed how software gets run. Most of the AI money in software has gone into the IDE: code generation, copilots, developer assistants, faster pull requests. That work matters. But writing software is one slice of the lifecycle. The harder problem, and the more expensive one, is running that software in production. Production is where systems fail in ways nobody predicted. Incidents don't stay inside one service.

PagerDuty fires. You open the incident. Title, timestamp, nothing else. Whatever context exists is in someone's head, in a Slack thread from two weeks ago, or in a runbook nobody has touched since the last reorg. We got tired of that. So we put an AURA agent behind a Slack bot and pointed it at our own production environment.

By: Tucker Callaway, CEO at Mezmo The market keeps saying “SaaS is dead.” That’s probably true, but it’s also incomplete. What’s actually dying is the idea that value lives inside a vendor-controlled black box. The next era is about utilities: unlimited coding capacity and unlimited analytical capability. And if those two utilities are real, then the vendor model has to change.