Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Top tips: Small digital habits that save you hours every week

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what's trending in the tech world and list practical ways to explore these trends. This week, we're looking at something we rarely think about until the end of the day: the tiny digital habits that quietly eat away at our time. Have you finished a workday feeling busy but strangely unaccomplished? You started with the best intentions.

Synthetic Monitoring Is Broken. Your Production Traffic Can Fix It.

Synthetic monitoring has been a critical part of application reliability for years. It gives engineering and operations teams a way to proactively test applications, APIs, and critical customer journeys before users encounter problems. But there is a fundamental limitation with the traditional approach: Someone has to create the tests. As applications become more distributed and customer journeys become more complex, organizations can end up maintaining hundreds or even thousands of synthetic scripts.

Cavalry or cattle? Let the machine decide

Long before dashboards and decibel-loud alerts, there were watchtowers. Every kingdom worth its salt had them, men perched on hills, lighting fires to signal the moment they spotted something suspicious on the horizon. It was, in its time, a fine system. The trouble was that watchmen, being human, occasionally mistook a herd of cattle for an invading army, or a dust storm for smoke, and lit their fires anyway.

Garbage in, garbage out: Splunk's Steve Flanders on why AI can't fix your bad telemetry

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Steve Flanders, who leads AI transformation at Splunk and wrote the book on OpenTelemetry, to talk about why AI acceleration without strong observability foundations creates more problems than it solves.

What data sources does agentic ITOps use

Agentic IT operations have arrived. It’s no longer a question of if enterprise IT departments will adopt agentic ITOps, but how quickly. The question we hear most often at BigPanda isn’t “what are agentic ITOps,” it’s “what data do we actually need to get started?” That’s the right question to ask. Agentic AI is only as good as the data and context that feeds it. Real-time observability and telemetry data from machines. Structured ITSM and workflow records.

From Log Line to Merged Fix: AI SRE Agent AURA with GitHub MCP

Knowing why it broke is not the same as having it repaired. Point the agent at the repos behind the service and the change comes back as a pull request. A Govee integration crash-loops under Home Assistant because the container cannot write to a directory it does not own. That much was already established: the previous homelab video stopped at the root cause on purpose, so the next pass could improve the agent's configuration first.

Can't Plan Next Year or Even Next Week? Start With One Document

If you're struggling to plan next week let alone next year, stop and assess where you actually stand. Define your desired future state, then put it on paper — just start somewhere. That one document becomes the roadmap you break down into your next 5 years. Watch the full IT Leadership Lab session.#Shorts.

Grafana Tempo: Trace diff & span pruning (August 2026 Community Call)

We will look at some new features: trace diff and span pruning Can't comment in the chat? You may need to create a channel. Join us live for an introduction to flame graphs. We’ll cover what they are, how to read them, and how to use them to find performance bottlenecks in your applications. Bring your questions! Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more.