Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On April 1st, I joined Akshay Utture from Augment Code for a webinar on how AI agents use production feedback to improve code.

If you’re like everyone else who works in software development, it’s a good bet that almost every single thing that you thought you knew about your business and engineering has changed as a result of the advent of modern LLMs. How should you respond to these changes? How should you change how you and your team develop software?

The agent era is here. Engineering teams are shipping AI-powered products, deploying multi-agent systems, and trying to figure out what observability even means for non-deterministic systems.

In our previous post in our series on observability for the agent era, we looked at how Honeycomb provides unique visibility into LLMs operating in your production environment. Now, let’s flip it around and explore how Honeycomb provides observability insights uniquely suited to helping your AI agents rapidly diagnose and fix production issues, and build production feedback into the next round of development.

The previous two posts in this series have looked at some of the use cases Honeycomb customers are implementing to observe LLMs in production and power agentic observability workflows. In this third and final post, we’ll take it back to basics and look at how the fundamental capabilities and infrastructure of Honeycomb provide the comprehensive data and fast performance that makes these use cases work at production scale. AI capabilities built on a weak observability foundation fall apart fast.

Honeycomb was excited to attend KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, where one theme stood out across sessions: as AI reshapes how software is built and run, teams are being pushed to rethink how they understand their systems. Without strong observability and feedback loops, AI can accelerate confusion, misalignment, and operational risk.

One of the most important and meaningful cornerstones that has defined and powered my career so far has been how I try to use my skills and talents to make the people around me stronger and achieve positive outcomes. My roles in tech have predominantly been in the ops engineering domain. I consider myself an ops engineer; a title I wear with pride.

Since releasing our hosted MCP server last year, we've been thrilled to see customers not just adopt it but build Honeycomb deeply into their agentic development and observability workflows. Users have embraced it, leveraging Honeycomb to stay in conversation with their code and understand how it runs in production.

Production is a rowdy place of chaos, especially at scale. When you have millions of requests per second flowing through your system, weird things are always happening. Outliers, unusual request patterns, spikes and pulses of traffic from unknown sources, port scanning…it’s all there. To the naked eye, it looks like noise. If you know what you are looking for…patterns emerge. The night sky: every dot is a request. Without intent, it's an undifferentiated field of light.

Most engineering leaders today understand that diversity matters. They've built teams that reflect a range of backgrounds, functions, and experience levels. They run postmortems, retrospectives, and architecture reviews that bring multiple voices to the table. They believe, not unreasonably, that this variety of perspectives leads to better decisions. But there's a problem hiding inside that assumption that can undermine everything: who people are is a surprisingly poor predictor of how they think.