Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

Root cause analysis tools are designed to help engineering teams understand why failures happen in production and other remote environments. As modern systems become more distributed and input-dependent, many incidents cannot be reproduced outside live environments. The stakes are significant: high-impact IT outages cost organizations a median of $2 million per hour, with annual downtime costs reaching $76 million per organization.

This blog is based on a recent live workshop. You can watch the the full livestream on Youtube. Next.js gives you a lot for free; server-side rendering, file-based routing, edge runtimes. What it doesn’t give you is a clear picture of what’s actually happening in production.

A runtime aware AI SRE extends existing AI SRE approaches by moving beyond telemetry correlation into runtime-validated reliability. While the majority of AI SRE tools accelerate incident triage using logs, metrics, and traces, they cannot confirm execution behavior if critical runtime signals were never captured. By generating on-demand evidence inside running services, AI SRES can eliminate slow redeploy cycles, ensuring your distributed systems remain resilient under real-world traffic conditions.

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.

Chris Watts is Head of Enterprise Engineering at OpenRouter, building infrastructure for AI applications. Previously at Amazon and a startup founder. As large language models become core infrastructure for more and more applications, teams are discovering a familiar challenge in a new context: you can't improve what you can't see.

Coroot's node agent uses eBPF to capture network traffic at the kernel level. It hooks into syscalls like read and write, reads the first bytes of each payload, and detects the protocol: HTTP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and others. This works for any language and any framework without touching application code. For encrypted traffic, we attach eBPF uprobes to TLS library functions like SSL_write and SSL_read in OpenSSL, crypto/tls in Go, and rustls in Rust.