Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Getting Started with Home Assistant Webhooks & Writing to InfluxDB

If you’re already running or are familiar with Home Assistant, you’ve likely worked with integrations, maybe a few automations, and possibly MQTT as a way to wire devices together. But webhooks add another layer of flexibility that lets you level up your smart home into a fully-customized, intelligent network. Instead of relying on built-in integrations and being confined to the same local network, you can let external devices and services push events directly into Home Assistant.

Deploy on Friday, Ep. 139

It's Friday, which means it's time to deploy! This week we're covering two weeks of news. On the Octopus side, we have new videos on vibe deployments and proving ROI with the Value Metrics Dashboard, a new Kubernetes migration webinar, and more! In the wider ecosystem, Kubernetes 1.36 "Haru" shipped with user namespaces going GA and Ingress-NGINX officially retired. Docker launched microVM sandboxes for AI coding agents. And Google said developer loyalty to AI tools is at zero.

Improved Microsoft 365 private status integration

Keeping track of your Microsoft 365 services just got easier. We’ve rolled out an update to the Microsoft 365 integration that removes manual setup and improves visibility. All services in your account can now automatically appear as components, so you can monitor them right away.

Reports just got smarter

We’ve upgraded the Reports page in StatusGator to give you more insight directly inside the StatusGator dashboard. Previously, reporting was limited to exports you could use to calculate your own uptime percentages and trends. Now, in addition to exported reports, you can view key reports and metrics without needing to download anything. We’ve also added a one-click download of the most commonly requested report: Uptime percentage by monitor.

Isolate a User Session in Datadog Synthetics with proxymock

A customer pings support: “I tried to check out twice this morning and got a 500 each time, but it works fine for everyone else.” The session ID is in the email. You have full request/response capture in your environment, you have Datadog Synthetics already running browser checks against the same flow, and you still spend the next two hours grepping logs because none of those tools let you say “show me just this user’s requests, in order, and re-run them.”

DORA Metrics in the AI Era: Why Deployment Isn't Faster

DORA metrics in the AI era reveal a paradox: PR volume is climbing, but deployment frequency is staying flat. In this talk, GitKraken's Director of Product Jeff Schinella breaks down why AI-accelerated code generation is creating a review bottleneck that your DORA metrics can't fully explain on their own. Jeff walks through how PR metrics (cycle time, first response time, code churn, and PR size) serve as the leading indicators behind your DORA data. If your deployment frequency is flat while PR counts go up, the bottleneck isn't your devs. It's your review capacity.

Ticket Taker to Team Leader: Managing an Agentic IT Workforce

The promise of AI in IT service management has been circulating for years. Chatbots that deflect tickets. Virtual agents that answer FAQs. Automation that routes requests. These are useful, but probably not the dream-state you were originally sold. What's different today is the arrival of agentic AI: systems that don't just respond to instructions but reason, act, and adapt across multi-step workflows with real consequences. The question for IT leaders is no longer whether to adopt agentic ITSM.

What happens when you delete everything? Three minutes, or thirty hours.

Last year, at the annual conference for an open source framework you've definitely heard of, I walked up to the founder in a room outside the main stage. He was hunched over his laptop, frantic. We've known each other for a few years. "What's going on? Is everything okay?" He looked up with the specific shade of white people only get when they realize they've made a big mistake.