Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

N+1 query problems are one of the most common, and quietly damaging, performance issues in production applications. One extra query per record feels harmless in development. At scale, it becomes the reason your response times degrade and your database buckles under load. Today, AppSignal adds N+1 detection to its OpenTelemetry support. When we identify the pattern in a trace, we collapse the repetitive spans directly in the timeline, making the problem immediately visible in the trace itself.

Slow endpoints are difficult to detect because they don’t fail. They simply get slower and slower. Average latency may look fine, but that can be misleading. That’s why we need to look at other values, like p90 and p95, which often reflect what’s really going on. For example, p90 represents the slowest 10% of requests, and p95 represents the slowest 5%. When these values increase, users start experiencing delays.

Agentic workloads thrive with precision tooling. Just like developers, they need the rich context, high cardinality, and fast feedback loops that allow them to ask exploratory open-ended questions of their code. But instrumentation is costly, and from the dawn of software, developers have tried to do the most possible with the least amount of resources.

OpenTelemetry is great at answering one question: “what just broke?” The problem is that most teams need a different answer first: “what is about to break in this release?” That is where trace-based testing comes in, especially for teams running a vendor-neutral OTel stack (Collector + Tempo/Jaeger + Prometheus) and needing deterministic release gates.

Boomi is an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) used by thousands of organizations to connect applications, data, and workflows across cloud and on-premises environments. Business-critical processes, from order fulfillment pipelines to customer data synchronization, depend on Boomi Atoms and Molecules running reliably.

You spent months instrumenting your app with OpenTelemetry. The idea of ripping it out to adopt a new observability backend is not an option. Sentry's OTLP endpoint means you don't have to. In fact, two environment variables are all you need and your existing traces start showing up in Sentry's trace explorer. Sentry's OTLP support is currently in open beta. This means you can start using it today, but there are some known limitations we'll cover later.

The reason why I like writing recap articles is because AIs don’t have enough context to write them for us. You have to be there, in person, listen to sessions, interact in the hallways with the community, and absorb as much new knowledge as possible. That’s what I did last week in Amsterdam at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe ‘26. Well, at least I tried to. Let me break down what I consider the most interesting topics were last week.