Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Five worthy reads: Brains or bots-are we forgetting how to think?

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we are exploring how prolonged dependence on AI could influence human beings' neural pathways, cognitive habits, and the behavioral changes that follows. As children, many of us would have watched the juggler at a circus in amazement. One ball became two, then three, and several more since it was a cumulative act.

Webinar: Halo & SquaredUp - Dashboards that deliver

SquaredUp and Halo teamed up for a live webinar exploring why visibility matters, the reporting challenges many organisations face, and how HaloPSA data can be transformed into engaging dashboards using SquaredUp. We also heard from a customer on how they're using dashboards to manage costs and improve service delivery. Whether your goal is sharper reporting, greater visibility for customers, or a clearer demonstration of the value your services deliver, this session offers practical insights and real-world examples to help you get there.

How to use Grafana Assistant with the AWS CloudWatch data source

Grafana Assistant meets AWS CloudWatch! In this video, Staff Software Engineer Ivana Huckova shows how to use Grafana Assistant, the AI agent built into Grafana Cloud, with the Amazon CloudWatch data source. Watch her query CloudWatch metrics and logs in plain language, build dashboards in seconds, and troubleshoot AWS resources — no query syntax required.

New AI Features in Playwright (Live-Webinar)

An AI agent that can't open a browser is just guessing. Stefan from Checkly shows how giving AI coding agents a real browser via Playwright enables reliable end-to-end test generation and debugging, closing the quality gap created by faster, AI-driven shipping. The session compares Playwright MCP vs the Playwright CLI for agent workflows, showing that thanks to MCP spec changes, lazy tool loading, and skills, the two are now effectively just different interfaces to the same tool, with no real token advantage either way.

Cortex | Tabular Views Now in Public Beta

The World Cup is down to the final two, and so is Cortex's Coming Home Dashboard. In this Feature Friday, VP of Strategic Initiatives & Marketing Cristina Buenahora walks through an update on the Coming Home Dashboard she and Edward Spencer built a month ago, and the product update behind it. What she covers: Whether you're tracking brackets or tracking engineering maturity, the view's the same. Reach out to your CSM to try it.

AI-Powered Ransomware Is Here: How Agentic AI Is Changing Cybersecurity

AI-powered ransomware is becoming a reality. Researchers recently demonstrated autonomous AI agents that can scout networks, steal credentials, and accelerate ransomware attacks. In this 60-second Zero Ticket Minute, learn what this means for cybersecurity, IT operations, and the future of agentic AI. Can AI also help stop these attacks? Watch to find out.

Microsoft's 570 Patches Just Armed Every Attacker

Microsoft patched 570 security vulnerabilities this Patch Tuesday — but every patch is also a public disclosure. The second those fixes drop, attackers know exactly where 570 weaknesses live. The only question that matters: can you find and patch them across your entire environment before someone exploits them? The speed of discovery is only increasing. Are you ready for the velocity of this new world? Let us know in the comments.

Tracing a memory leak bug in PID 1 and contributing an upstream fix: a Linux support story

Some memory leaks are straightforward to detect. A process allocates memory, forgets to free it, and grows until something breaks. This was not that kind of leak. This is the story of how Canonical Support helped a global retail organization trace the cause for an unusual memory leak originating in PID 1, the very first process started by the kernel during the system boot sequence. The memory footprint was 10 times higher than expected.