Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’ve been using Honeycomb for a bit, you know that Calculated Fields (otherwise known as derived columns) are a powerful way to transform your events to a format that’s easier to query and understand. However, they use a lisp-esque language that can be difficult to read and a pain to write. If you dislike making Calculated Fields and want something a little easier, here’s a generative AI prompt that can generate them from natural language.

OpsGenie has served many teams well for years, but with Atlassian’s OpsGenie 2027 sunset announcement and as it enters its maintenance phase, it’s time to look forward and plan your next move. Running tomorrow’s operations on yesterday’s technology isn’t just risky – it’s holding you back. This isn’t just a transition – it’s an opportunity to leap ahead.

ITOps and Incident Management teams must manually handle high volumes of daily alerts, tickets, and incidents. This makes it challenging to spot recurring patterns that could be addressed or prevented. Without proactive problem management, teams waste time resolving repeat issues instead of focusing on higher-priority or first-time problems. Limited visibility into incident trends forces organizations to engage in reactive firefighting, diverting valuable time from addressing the root cause.

It’s 2 a.m. Alerts flood your dashboard. Transactions are failing, but logs offer no clues. Your SRE team is drowning in noise—while users struggle with outages. As Java workloads shift to microservices, Kubernetes, and the cloud, this problem is compounded. Exceptions cascade across tiers, triggering blame games while the root cause remains buried under fragmented logs and scattered alerts. Legacy monitoring tools overwhelm SREs with raw data but fail to connect the dots.

SSL/TLS certificates are critical for secure communication, and keeping track of their expiration is essential. Until now, Let’s Encrypt has sent email notifications when certificates were about to expire. However, as of June 2025, Let’s Encrypt will discontinue these expiration emails. This change could lead to expired certificates going unnoticed, potentially causing security risks and downtime.

I have a not-so-secret suspicion that the dream of everyone working with technology is the Enterprise computer from Star Trek. Controlling shields, communications, engines, and everything else from a single place—and with voice commands, no less. “One button to rule them all,” as Sauron might whisper. But until that utopia becomes a reality, at least we can implement a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) in our organization’s technology stack.