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The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.

OpenTelemetry in Production: Design for Order, High Signal, Low Noise, and Survival

A lot of talk around OpenTelemetry has to do with instrumentation, especially auto-instrumentation, about OTel being vendor neutral, being open and a defacto standard. But how you use the final output of OTel is what makes business difference. In other words, how do you use it to make your life as an SRE/DevOps/biz person easier? How do you have to set things up to truly solve production issues faster?

Sentry acquires XcodeBuildMCP

Today we're announcing that Sentry has acquired XcodeBuildMCP, an open source MCP server that gives AI agents the ability to build, test, and debug native iOS and macOS apps. XcodeBuildMCP has become a go-to tool for agentic Apple-platform development, with more than 4,000 GitHub stars and an active community. It unlocks the full developer loop: build, run, debug, interact, and verify, allowing users to stay in their preferred agentic development environment.

Agent vs Assistant: The key distinction between Olly and the competition

The market is saturated with agents and assistants, making it difficult to tell them apart. However, the difference between these two approaches is significant. They offer radically distinct levels of impact, reflecting major differences in both their technical complexity and the quality of their inferences. Let’s figure out the distinction.

Investigate Issues in Slack: Grafana Cloud Slack App with AI

The Grafana Cloud app for Slack brings observability and incident response closer to where you and your teams already collaborate Ask questions about system health, alerts, on-call schedules, and Grafana Cloud features; manage incidents and alerts; and collaborate with full context.

Happy Birthday to Us: Honeycomb 10 Year Manifesto, Part 1

Christine and I started Honeycomb in 2016, which means it’s been ten years. Christine, a developer, and I, an operations engineer, were both profoundly unhappy with the state of the art in monitoring and logging tools. The tools we had used at Facebook didn’t spray our signals around to a bunch of siloed-off pillars. They consolidated as much context as possible so we could properly explore it, the way every other non-software engineering team already takes for granted.

A Notification List Is Not a Team

In the previous post, we looked at how alert noise is rarely accidental. It’s usually the result of sensible decisions layered over time, until responsibility becomes diffuse and response slows. One of the most persistent assumptions behind this pattern is simple. If enough people are notified, someone will take responsibility. After more than fourteen years of working with engineering teams of every size and shape, we’ve seen this assumption fail repeatedly.