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Reliability Engineering in the AI Era

Engineering leaders have been claiming to “shift quality left” for years but production remains stubbornly stuck out of reach of software engineers. The realm of production remains mysterious with tools no one has access to and UIs that wouldn’t make sense to engineers anyway. I’ve noticed a small but growing trend of large enterprises hiring Reliability Engineers instead of Site Reliability Engineers. Dropping one word looks cosmetic but I think it points to a much bigger change.

From Telemetry to Traffic

A metric says latency increased. A log says a request failed. A trace identifies the slow dependency. An APM agent points to the method. Manual instrumentation explains the business operation. Traffic capture shows the exact request and response that triggered it. Each layer answers a question the previous layer could not. Each also introduces a new cost, blind spot, and failure mode.

Token budgets: capping AI agent and LLM spend

AI costs are changing. As noted by research from EY, outputs that cost just $0.04 in 2023 now cost $1.20, a 30x increase over just three years. It’s worth noting that task operations and complexity have also changed. In 2023, the process was simple. Users input a question, retrieval engines found relevant data, and AI models returned a response. Today, many tasks are handled by orchestrated AI agents capable of much more complex reasoning and analysis.

Multi-Agent Orchestration for SRE: AURA Runs a Model per Specialist

Give one agent every tool and every incident is a question of trust. This one hands each job to a worker that can only reach what that job needs. One AURA configuration defines a coordinator and three specialist workers. Qdrant stores the runbooks, Prometheus measures workload health, and Kubernetes provides inspection and remediation, and each of the three is wired to one worker.

You Vibe Coded an App...Now What?

"Hey, I built this over the weekend. I want to get it in front of customers." And it always hits architecture, security, and infrastructure. Ross Hendrickson, CTO at Inspectiv, calls that gap the chasm. His team crosses it on Control Plane: AI-written code secured, reviewed, and released in a day. Control Plane combines AWS, GCP, Azure and your own hardware into one virtual cloud shaped to your workloads.

When to Use Grafana Assistant vs. MCP vs. GCX: Part 2

When should you reach for Grafana MCP? It’s one of the two “hands” in Grafana’s AI toolkit — and the easy one at that. MCP lets you bring Grafana into the tools you already use, like ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor, without changing your workflow. No terminal? MCP. Want to stick with your favorite AI tool? MCP. Want easy tool discovery out of the box? MCP. Here’s where it fits, and when to use it — explained by Nicole van der Hoeven.

AI Agents Need Guardrails: Building Autonomous IT with Resolve Agent Lab | Agents of IT

AI agents are moving fast. For enterprises, the bigger question is how to make them useful, trusted, and safe enough to take action. In this episode of Agents of IT, Zach Austin and Ian Coppock unpack what it takes to move from experimenting with AI to operationalizing agentic AI across the enterprise. They explore why organizations are racing to deploy AI before defining the problems they want to solve, why governance and scoped responsibilities are critical, and why the real value of AI comes from fixing and orchestrating the workflows underneath it.

Why we stopped hiring for the skills we used to hire for

Six engineers, two QA, a product owner and a Scrum Master used to be a normal squad. With today's tooling, that's bloat. Teams are being rebuilt around three people. Not because the work got smaller — because agentic tooling absorbed the parts that needed all those hands. The engineer's job shifts from writing the code to directing the agents that write it, and owning the outcome that comes out the other end.

7 lessons for IT leaders on using observability to monitor AI applications

What it takes to prove AI value with LLM observability Over six months, the Elastic IT team ran internal AI applications that returned $2.5 million in operational time to the business.1 A conversational support assistant moved us from zero digital resolution, where anything complex became a ticket, to 30% of support interactions closing without one.