Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As organizations grow, they face increasing difficulty in managing their observability efforts. More teams mean more dashboards, monitors, API keys, pipelines, and custom configurations. Without a centralized view, administrators spend hours chasing down untagged resources, investigating surprise bills, and revoking dormant credentials. Governance becomes a reactive effort to reduce waste and address issues, falling short of its potential to proactively create standards and optimize observability.

Selecting the right observability platform has become a strategic priority for enterprises operating at scale.

Last week was a great reminder for me about the challenges of the traditional model of observability defined by the “three pillars” of metrics, logs, and traces. One of the customers I’m currently working with is a large financial institution that has a robust three pillar implementation. Every critical application ships their telemetry to either or both their cloud-native tool and a central tool.

Traditionally, achieving deep visibility into distributed systems required significant trade-offs in engineering time. Collecting meaningful application metrics and traces required teams to embed language-specific agents, modify source code, or manage complex library dependencies across every service.

AI SREs are autonomous systems that handle incident triage, root cause analysis, and remediation by correlating logs, metrics, traces, and code signals. However, as they rely on pre-configured telemetry, the critical execution details of a specific failure, such as variable state and code paths, can often be missed. As a result, they either force users into manual redeploy loops or make inferences from partial data, diagnosing issues using probability rather than proof.

Over the last three months, we’ve been exploring what about software development and observability changes with AI, and what doesn’t. Our conclusion: these five principles will still remain true, even when 90% of the code is AI-driven. The agentic AI space is moving fast. Models are improving, context windows are expanding, and the ways people build and operate agents are changing so fast that any thoughts we share could feel dated by the time you read this.

Agentic workloads thrive with precision tooling. Just like developers, they need the rich context, high cardinality, and fast feedback loops that allow them to ask exploratory open-ended questions of their code. But instrumentation is costly, and from the dawn of software, developers have tried to do the most possible with the least amount of resources.