Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AI SRE is making real strides in resolving some of the greatest pains related to incident response, troubleshooting, and complex root cause analysis. The on-call rotation, the war room, the week-long RCA, and the ticket queue that ate a third of every platform engineer’s week all look different now than they did two years ago.

Summary InfluxDB 3.11 delivers major performance and data management updates for growing time series workloads, with significantly faster queries on recent data, expanded support for wide and ultra-sparse schemas, and a more predictable resource profile under load. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise also adds backup and restore, bulk Parquet import, row-level deletes, and a built-in Explorer UI.

When spend moves, the first question is always “compared to what?” Answering it used to mean pulling up two tabs with two different date ranges and toggling between them, or squinting at a single delta number without the ability to customize what you’re comparing against. Compare Periods puts both periods in front of you at once, so a spike, a regression, or a shift shows up on the chart and in the cost table, without you doing the math yourself.

AI cost monitoring is the continuous tracking of AI and LLM spend in real time, broken down by the models, features, teams, and customers generating it. It is not the same as reading the monthly bill - done well, it shows spend as it happens, flags anomalies before they become invoices, and connects every dollar to an outcome so finance can protect AI ROI instead of explaining it after the fact.

Agentic AI cost is what you pay to run AI agents, and it is mostly tokens. An agent does not answer once. It loops, calls tools, reads the results, and reasons again, re-sending a growing context every step. Anthropic found agents use about 4x the tokens of a chat, and multi-agent systems about 15x. You control it by capping runs, right-sizing the architecture, routing, caching, and measuring cost per task, then tying every agent to the AI ROI it produces.

Enterprise networks have outgrown the flat, predictable topologies they were built on. Traffic now crosses on-premises data centers, multiple public clouds, SD-WAN links, and the home connections of a distributed workforce. When any one of those segments degrades, the business feels it as slow applications, failed transactions, and frustrated users — long before anyone confirms the network is the cause.

In May I wrote that you probably don’t need private PKI for internal infrastructure, because DNS validation gets a publicly trusted certificate onto hosts that never touch the internet. In June I pointed out that Apple enforces an 825-day cap on private certificates, so your own CA doesn’t even free you from the browser vendors. Two days ago I told you that public client certificates stop renewing in October, and that the replacement is a private certificate authority.

Observing fast-growing agentic workloads is no small feat, especially if you try to build your own monitoring stack or rely solely on tools built for a time before LLMs. At Grafana Labs, we know this all too well.