Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Netdata has always collected database metrics: connections, throughput, replication lag, buffer cache hit ratios, and so on. These tell you that something is wrong, but they don’t tell you why. When your PostgreSQL response time spikes, the metric alone doesn’t tell you which query is responsible. For that, you’ve traditionally needed to SSH into the box, connect to the database, and run diagnostic queries manually. Or set up a separate database monitoring tool entirely.

Every minute a network incident goes unresolved costs your company money. Lost productivity, missed SLAs, degraded user experience, and, in other cases, direct revenue loss. For IT teams and network admins, the pressure to resolve incidents fast isn't just operational, it's existential.

Documentation search is often the last thing devs think about, until someone posts publicly that they couldn't find a basic answer, or your support queue fills up with things that are genuinely in the docs. We decided to get ahead of that. This is the story of how we went from a minimal keyword-only search on our docs to a conversational Ask AI experience.

GCP's load balancer silently rewrites your traceparent header, orphaning spans in any OTLP backend. Here's the custom propagator that fixes it. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

Top Tips is a weekly column where we look at what’s shaping the tech world and share practical ways teams can stay prepared for what’s next. This week, we’re focusing on a situation many teams underestimate—what happens to your IT systems when a key leader steps away, and how you can build stability that doesn’t rely on any one person. Some problems don’t show up when things are running smoothly. They show up when someone leaves.

The allure of OpenClaw is undeniable. You deploy a highly autonomous, self-hosted AI agent, give it access to your repositories and inboxes, and watch it reason through complex workflows while you sleep. It is the dream of the ultimate 10x developer tool realized. But as any veteran DevOps engineer will tell you: running an LLM-backed Node.js agent in production is vastly different from testing it on your local machine.