Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Part of the motivation for this post is how cloud API economics are shifting: Anthropic is moving large enterprise customers toward per-token, usage-based billing (unbundled from flat seat fees), which makes “always call the API” a moving cost line for teams at scale. A hybrid or local layer is one way to keep spend bounded while you still use premium models where they matter.

You used to monitor services. Then you started monitoring AI calls inside services. Now your AI agent is spinning up other AI agents to complete tasks. Your old monitoring instincts need to evolve. This isn't hypothetical. Agentic architectures are already in production. Coding agents are calling search agents; orchestrators are spawning specialized sub-agents for retrieval, planning, and execution. Teams are shipping these systems faster than they're figuring out how to watch them.

Good agent infrastructure is less about exposing more endpoints and more about exposing a small set of composable, self-describing abstractions that minimize context overhead while encapsulating repetitive integration work.

Everyone is using AI to help with post-mortems now. The pitch is obvious: post-mortems are time-consuming, the blank page is brutal, and AI is very good at producing structured, confident-sounding documents quickly. We're not here to push back on that. We've built AI into our own post-mortem experience, pulling your Slack thread, timeline, PRs, and custom fields together and giving your team a meaningful starting point in seconds. We think that's genuinely valuable, and the teams using it agree.

We've been building the broader incident.io platform for several years now, and one thing we've learned is that UX matters more here than almost anywhere else. When an incident fires, there's no room for poorly designed interfaces or fumbling through features you haven't touched in a while. The product has to be ergonomic: easy to pick up, easy to navigate, with the right things at your fingertips at exactly the right moment. We've put a lot of effort into this over the last 5 years.

Key takeaway: AI agents and RAG pipelines only reach production-grade accuracy when they are developed against byte-level clones of real production data. Without environment parity, the "repro gap" leads to inevitable AI failure.

SREs and platform teams are overwhelmed by the effort of manually troubleshooting ever-more complex cloud-native environments. This pain is driving a breakneck adoption of AI SRE solutions that promise to automate core reliability practices, from root cause analysis to capacity planning. For teams with strong engineering talent, creating a DIY AI SRE seems like a straightforward challenge.