Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

The software development lifecycle is collapsing. The multi-stage pipeline that defined how software got built and shipped for decades is compressing into rapid loops of intent and validation, with agents now part of the teams building and running it. Day 1 of Innovation Week was about what that shift means for how software gets validated, where observability fits, and the problems that have always been hard but are now genuinely urgent.

Your dataset has hundreds of attributes. Some are self-explanatory: http.response.status_code, server.address. Others are not: meta.refinery.reason, dataset.slug, sli.latency_target_ms. If you don't know what an attribute means, you can't write a good query. And if an AI agent doesn't know what it means, it guesses.

TL;DR: Attribute. More information on one event gives us more correlation power. It’s also cheaper. When you want to add some information to your tracing telemetry, you could emit a log, create a span, or add a piece of data to your current span. Adding a piece of data to your current span is the best! Usually.

Do you receive 50 million log lines per day and struggle to see what actually matters? Health checks, heartbeat pings, connection pool messages—they all drown out the errors and anomalies you're trying to find. Most teams deal with this by writing filter rules to drop the noisy patterns. But those rules are manual, per-pattern, and brittle. A new deployment changes a log format and the filter misses it. A new service starts logging a chatty startup sequence nobody thought to exclude.

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.

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.

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.