Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Two things happen when engineers first connect the Honeycomb MCP to their AI assistant. The first is the blank page problem. The Honeycomb UI gives you something to react to: a heatmap, a query builder, a trace to click into. An AI assistant gives you a cursor and nothing else. When you don't know where to start, that's a hard place to be. The second shows up right after you get past the first one. You ask a question, you get a confident-sounding answer, and you're not sure whether to trust it.

The demands on financial services companies are intensifying rapidly. They must not only deliver seamless system performance but also control costs, secure sensitive data, and maximize the value of their observability investments. To navigate these converging pressures, leaders are evolving their approach to system monitoring and telemetry. The 2026 State of Observability in Financial Services research report reveals a fundamental shift in how organizations manage their digital infrastructure.

Many organizations deploying AI are learning similar lessons right now: the challenge isn’t this or that AI model, it’s the data. According to Gartner, 60% of AI projects will be abandoned by organizations because of failures to support these projects with AI-ready data. Also, 63% of organizations either lack or aren’t sure they have the right data management practices to get there.

If distributed architectures have altered how systems degrade, then the way organizations model operational must evolve accordingly. Threshold monitoring evaluates individual metrics. Correlation clusters related alerts. Neither, on its own, explains how instability in one component alters exposure across an interconnected service landscape. In conversations at Nexus Live 2025, ScienceLogic’s annual customer conference, leaders described this distinction with clarity.

The way you write code is changing, which means the way you observe your systems and respond to issues needs to change, too. Engineers today spend much of their day working via command line, as agentic tools like Cursor and Claude Code have become highly effective at handling many day-to-day engineering tasks. This greatly accelerates code generation, but it doesn't solve for the context switching that comes when you have to jump into another tool that's not part of this new, faster workflow.

One early spring morning in 1535, the residents of Stockholm awoke to a most curious sight. Six suns lit up the sky, connected by bright halos, as immortalized in Vädersolstavlan, seen here. Today, we recognize these atmospheric effects as a parhelion (also referred to as ‘sun dogs’)—an illusion caused by light refracting off crystalline formations in the atmosphere.

Coroot's node-agent already collects CPU profiles for any process on the node using eBPF, with zero integration from the application side. For Java, we dynamically inject async-profiler into the JVM to get memory and lock profiles. But Go processes were still a blind spot for non-CPU profiling unless the app exposed a pprof endpoint and the cluster-agent scraped it. We wanted the same zero-config experience for Go heap profiles. This post is about how we got there.

Observability in software is often framed as a choice between self-hosted and SaaS: manage it yourself, or pay a vendor to handle your data. Both self-hosted and SaaS approaches have their merits, but assuming you must choose one exclusively over the other leads to poor trade-offs: either overcommitting to an all-in-one SaaS despite spiraling costs, or fully self-hosting when it’s unnecessary.

For those of us using tools like Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini, we already know they’re powerful. They can write code, refactor functions, open PRs, even run commands. For a lot of developers, they’re already part of the daily workflow. But once you zoom out beyond the individual developer, the biggest problem isn’t productivity. It’s control. AI coding tools are powerful, but they introduce a new, unpredictable cost layer that most teams don’t fully understand.

Real production data tells the story better than I can. Juraci Paixão Kröhling, a friend and fellow observability practitioner at OllyGarden, recently shared an example from an anonymized production environment: 1,830 occurrences of http.url and 23,984 occurrences of url.full in the same dataset. Both attributes describe the same thing. Both are actively being written to the same backend at the same time.