Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We just wrapped O11yCon 2026, and this year's conversations hit differently. Agent-based software development is here, now. It's no longer an optional choice, and everybody is struggling to understand what their agents are doing and how to make them cost less and perform better. Over the course of fifteen talks, we saw clearly that the old assumptions on how and who (or what) writes our software has been upended. Here are some highlights. We'll have videos available in the near future.

Last week, we launched a major update to Canvas, our investigation workspace. The new Canvas has evolved from an AI co-pilot you chat with to a place where your whole team, human and agent, can work the same problem on the same surface. Auto-investigations begin the moment a trigger, SLO, or anomaly fires. Custom skills encode your team's runbooks so every agent investigates with your team's expertise built in.

Last week, we introduced Agent Timeline, a powerful new observability experience purpose-built for debugging AI agent workflows in production. Agent Timeline uniquely connects AI-layer visibility to full-stack observability by organizing telemetry around an agentic conversation. A conversation contains one or more agent executions, each of which may contain LLM calls, tool invocations, handoffs, retries, human escalations, and downstream system calls.

Customers regularly come to us looking to solve their observability problem by connecting the dots from frontend to backend. It sounds straightforward in theory, but in practice it's one of the hardest problems in modern application monitoring. The frontend monitoring tools they already have in place tend to be proprietary or narrowly scoped to frontend needs, leaving them without the context-rich backend data that makes real triage possible.

Honeycomb is proud to share that we have achieved the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Financial Services Competency. This recognition validates our technical expertise and proven customer success in assisting financial services organizations with building, running, and understanding their production systems on AWS. Securing this competency is a direct response to our customers’ feedback in this space: observability in regulated, high-stakes environments requires more than dashboards and alerts.

AI is reshaping the SDLC in two directions at once. AI-generated code is shipping faster and with less human supervision than ever before, while agents and LLMs are running directly in production, where they behave very differently from traditional software: non-deterministic, with a wider blast radius than any single function or component, with no stack trace to catch when something goes wrong.