Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I was looking at our Claude Code spend in the Anthropic console the other day. Aggregate cost, aggregate tokens — no breakdown by developer, no breakdown by session. I knew my Hackathon team had been using it heavily on building out new features for the OpenTelemetry Distro Builder. But heavily how? I had no idea. Turns out Claude Code has been emitting OpenTelemetry signals the whole time. Per-session cost, token counts, every tool call it makes on your codebase.

Over the past few years, Digital Employee Experience (DEX) has moved from emerging concept to essential capability for modern IT organizations. The conversation has changed. IT is no longer measured only by system uptime or ticket resolution. Today, success is defined by how technology actually performs for employees — and how consistently organizations can deliver productive, friction-free digital work.

Every year, Honeycomb runs disaster recovery scenarios in multiple environments, including in production. Although each of our instances runs in a single region, on at least three Availability Zones (AZs), we have multiple plans for partial regional failures, and particularly, zonal failures. One of these tests was run on December 5th, and after its successful completion came its cleanup steps.

In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting systems encode assumptions about how people behave, how responsibility is distributed, and how decisions are made under pressure.

IT problems happen even in the best architected infrastructure due to configuration changes, failures, upgrades and such. How quickly and effectively you can detect and resolve such problems dictates how efficient your IT operation is. Today, I’ll cover how eG Enterprise helped us troubleshoot a hardware failure (a storage battery failure) that that caused a cascade of failures in a VMware ESXi infrastructure.

Citrix has been transitioning products toward License Access Service (LAS) as the modern licensing method. Unlike traditional file-based licensing, LAS introduces service-based communication between products and the Citrix License Server. As of 15 April 2026, LAS becomes the mandatory licensing method for supported products. Environments still relying on file-based licensing will need to transition before that date.

This one is for all the Microsoft SCOM geeks out there — 99 practical tips & tricks to make managing SCOM way easier. The tips compiled here draw from community experts, SCOM-focused blogs, Microsoft’s official documentation, and the hands-on experience at NiCE. You may already know some of them, but having them all organized in one place makes it easy to reference and put them into practice.

We’ve added service status page ratings to API v3. You can now access the same letter grades, descriptions, and average acknowledgment delay metrics that appear on StatusGator service pages – directly from the API.

The Tier 2 SOC Analyst or the Incident Responder (often hailed as the "Sherlock Holmes of the network") faces an increasingly complex and relentless digital landscape. In a world where analysts are being overwhelmed by alerts, held back by fragmented, manual tooling and inefficient workflows, incident responders are charged with the critical task of identifying, analyzing, and mitigating security threats.

If you've ever rolled out Grafana Cloud to a growing engineering organization, this pattern may sound familiar: Everything feels simple at first. You invite a few teammates, give them access, and dashboards start appearing. Then the team grows. Then the number of stacks grows. Over time, a model that once felt fast and empowering starts to feel risky, difficult to understand, and even harder to undo. This post is about avoiding that moment.