Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ok MCP server, If you’ve been following AI development lately, you’ve probably heard whispers about “MCP Servers” floating around developer circles. It’s been around a little while now, and I myself have finally gotten round to using it. Boy, do we need to talk about it. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is Anthropic’s open standard that lets AI assistants connect directly to your tools and data sources, not just static documentation or code snippets.

Observability has always answered one core question: Is it running? But in the era of LLMs, autonomous agents, and AI-powered workflows, that’s no longer enough. We need to ask a harder, scarier question: Is it right? And right now, most teams can’t answer that. Let’s fix it. In our last post, “The AI Monitoring Crisis No One’s Talking About,” we outlined why prompt injection, hallucinations, and context drift create invisible failures.

At 2:37am on a cold Oregon night, a fire alarm blared at a rural station. Seconds later, the call came in: a structure fire on the outskirts of Rogue Valley. But what if that alarm never reached the station? This isn't a hypothetical. For the IT team at Emergency Communications of Southern Oregon (ECSO 911), it’s the kind of emergency scenario they prepare for every day.

If you’re running AI, ML, or data-intensive workloads on GPUs, monitoring their performance is critical. Overheating, under-utilization, or memory bottlenecks can cost you thousands in cloud bills and potential downtime. This guide walks you through collecting real-time GPU telemetry using nvidia-smi, sending it to Cribl Edge, routing it through Cribl Stream, and using Cribl Search to analyze the data—step by step.

Network visualization is the process of visually representing networks of connected entities, like devices, data flows, or relationships, using nodes and links. This technique helps in understanding complex data, identifying patterns, and improving network management by providing a clear visual overview of the network’s structure and behavior.

Fastify stands out among Node.js web frameworks for its obsessive focus on performance and boasts impressive benchmarks, with throughput often 2-3x higher than Express and other popular alternatives. But here's the paradox: without proper visibility, even applications with a good foundation will degrade over time as you add features and complexity.

Distributed tracing data is a unique and powerful observability signal, allowing you to understand how your services interact and the relationships between them. Sometimes it can be difficult, however, to turn raw tracing data into actionable insights. This is exactly why we introduced Grafana Traces Drilldown, an application that lets you quickly investigate and visualize your tracing data through a simplified, queryless experience.