Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Our Results Daemon processes about 92 million messages a day. We recently rewrote it from Node.js to Go, and we let Claude Code write it. We wanted to know whether we could trust an agentic rewrite for a critical, high-throughput production service rather than a prototype. It shipped with zero incidents, a 70% reduction in running pods, and a lighter database load.

MCP servers have a reputation: they eat your context window. CLIs paired with skills, on the other hand, are more token efficient. But is this still true? I dropped all my MCP servers five months ago. Five months is a long time in AI land. When Anthropic came up with the concept of skills, many people stopped using MCP servers in favor of CLI tooling and skills.

There's a support ticket every SRE dreads: "is something wrong with my database?" The outage is bad enough. Worse is the possibility that the customer knew first. At Upstash, we treat that scenario as two failures rather than one: the incident itself, and the uptime monitoring gap that let a customer beat us to it. We write a postmortem for the gap, too.

Monitoring load is not always steady. A team might add a new batch of checks or run several ad hoc tests during a rollout. When that happens, your Private Location agents need to pick up more work at once. If there aren’t enough agents available during a burst, checks start piling up in the queue, which can delay or disrupt check execution. But solving this by running a high number of agents around the clock has the opposite problem: most of that capacity sits idle until the next busy period.

You get an infrastructure alert. Something's off, so you task your agent to investigate, and it ends up grepping through the logs. You both wonder if there's customer impact. There’s a simple rule: AI agents in the incident loop are only as good as the signal you feed them. And logs alone aren't a great signal.

A Playwright Check fails at 2 am. The login flow is broken. Until today, that alert triggered a human to get up, open the Checkly dashboard, copy Rocky AI root cause analysis (RCA), and then tell an agent to get to work. There were two AI agents, one incident, and no way for them to talk to each other. The extended checkly checks and new checkly rca CLI commands close that gap. Your coding agent can now pull Rocky AI's analysis into its ongoing work, read the diagnosis, and go fix the code.

This is a guest post by Vince Graics, Staff QA Engineer at World of Books. If you're running a Shopify storefront and want reliable synthetic monitoring, you'll hit a wall. Shopify's bot detection doesn't care that your headless browser is friendly; it sees datacenter IPs and acts accordingly. Cart API calls get hit with 429 rate limits, Cloudflare challenge pages pop up mid-check, and you're left wondering whether the bug is in your code or in the platform fighting you.

The Checkly Playwright Reporter is an npm package that sends the results of npx playwright test to Checkly as a cloud test session, including traces, screenshots, videos, and full debugging context. Run your Playwright suite in CI or locally, and every result gets a persistent, shareable home in Checkly with AI-powered analysis, richer trace-derived views, and a direct path to production monitoring. It does not replace Playwright. It makes the output of Playwright much easier to work with.

November 24th, the Opus 4.5 release turned around the entire tech industry. This was the moment when agents became capable. Capable enough to write solid staff-level code. Capable enough to reason about alerts, investigate root causes much faster than most engineers, and set up the reliability layer faster. For me, this feels like an iPhone moment on steroids; the adoption of AI is accelerating much faster than any adoption curve I’ve seen over the past few decades.

Half of the Checkly CLI users are already coding agents. This is not a prediction — it's what the data shows today. Since February, more and more agents have been using the CLI to manage and configure their Checkly monitoring setups. Right now, we're at 50% human and 50% agentic CLI users. And we predict that by the end of 2026, it won't be humans using the CLI; the agents will have taken over. The terminal became the primary interface for AI agents doing real work in the Checkly ecosystem.