Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Compliance audits used to be annual fire drills. Teams would scramble for weeks gathering screenshots, pulling logs, and hoping nothing slipped through the cracks. That approach no longer works when regulations like GDPR and HIPAA require continuous documentation and real-time evidence of security controls. Website monitoring tools designed for compliance have evolved to address this reality, automating evidence collection and flagging issues before auditors ever arrive.

I was looking at our Claude Code spend in the Anthropic console the other day. Aggregate cost, aggregate tokens — no breakdown by developer, no breakdown by session. I knew my Hackathon team had been using it heavily on building out new features for the OpenTelemetry Distro Builder. But heavily how? I had no idea. Turns out Claude Code has been emitting OpenTelemetry signals the whole time. Per-session cost, token counts, every tool call it makes on your codebase.

Over the past few years, Digital Employee Experience (DEX) has moved from emerging concept to essential capability for modern IT organizations. The conversation has changed. IT is no longer measured only by system uptime or ticket resolution. Today, success is defined by how technology actually performs for employees — and how consistently organizations can deliver productive, friction-free digital work.

Every year, Honeycomb runs disaster recovery scenarios in multiple environments, including in production. Although each of our instances runs in a single region, on at least three Availability Zones (AZs), we have multiple plans for partial regional failures, and particularly, zonal failures. One of these tests was run on December 5th, and after its successful completion came its cleanup steps.

In the previous posts, we’ve looked at how alert noise emerges from design decisions, why notification lists fail to create accountability, and why alerts only work when they’re designed around a clear outcome. Taken together, these ideas point to a broader conclusion. That alerting is not just a technical system, it’s a socio-technical one. Alerting systems encode assumptions about how people behave, how responsibility is distributed, and how decisions are made under pressure.