Long-Running AI Agents Need a Lease, a Heartbeat, and a Drain Test
NVIDIA's June 2026 GTC Taipei program includes a session on long-running AI agents that plan and operate over hours or days. Once a task outlives one …
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Our drift-warning hook was silently dead for 23 days. Zero warnings looked exactly like good behavior.
Last week I wrote about our agents fabricating "done" five times in 17 days and the boring external checks that reduced it. This is the embarrassing s…
How to Review a Signup Regression After a Next.js Release
A signup regression after a Next.js release should not start with panic. It should start with a narrow review. The dangerous version is familiar: a de…
Prometheus Agent Mode vs Grafana Alloy: Choosing the Right Push Agent in 2026
TL;DR: If you only collect metrics, Prometheus Agent mode is lightweight, familiar, and difficult to beat. If you collect metrics, logs, or traces tog…
Debug a Legacy Frontend-Backend Deployment With One Trace ID
Legacy frontend-backend deployments fail in layers. A React build can be correct while the proxy serves last week's files. Django can be healthy while…
Observability as Code: Managing Dashboards and Alerts with Terraform
The Problem with Click-Ops Dashboards Your team has 200 dashboards. You don't know who owns them. Half are broken. The rest show yesterday's reality. …
GitHub lets enterprises pin Copilot's OpenTelemetry endpoint
Where Copilot's telemetry stream lands, decided centrally GitHub added a control on July 8 that lets an enterprise mandate where the Copilot Chat exte…
I Traced a Multi-Step LLM Agent With Self-Hosted SigNoz. One Feature Sold Me.
Multi-step LLM agents fail in a way normal backends don't. Nothing crashes. The pipeline "works", the answer is just bad, slow or three times more exp…
The expensive half of your incident bot is the half you didn't build
An incident bot caught the CrashLoopBackOff at 3:12 a.m., proposed delete_pod, and the on-call approved it half asleep at 3:14. The new pod went Runni…
Re: Downloads are vanity — building observable install paths for agents
Great point @alexshev — downloads ARE a vanity metric. The real signal is: did the agent connect, complete a workflow, and self-diagnose failures? We …
End of week. Here's the thing I kept coming back to:
LinkedIn Draft — Insight (2026-07-10) End of week. Here's the thing I kept coming back to: SLOs work when they create conversations, not when they cre…
Cost-Effective Observability: The 80/20 Stack for Startups
You Don't Need Datadog (Yet) I see startups spending $5,000/month on Datadog with 8 engineers. That's $625 per engineer per month for monitoring. At t…
5 Ways Your AI Agent Will Fail (And How to Prevent Them)
Your agent works in testing. Then you deploy it and things break in ways you didn't expect. Here are five failure modes I've seen repeatedly, with Typ…
Helicone was acquired by Mintlify. Here is a migration checklist if you are moving off.
On March 3, 2026, Helicone announced it was joining Mintlify. If you run Helicone in production, the practical question is not whether the acquisition…
When an LLM answer is wrong, the trace is where you look. Some tools make that easy.
A user reports a hallucinated answer in prod. To fix it you need the full trace of that one request, and how fast you can pull it depends entirely on …
Observability for LLM Apps: Tracing, Cost Tracking, and Eval Loops
If you've shipped a traditional backend service, you already know the observability checklist: logs, metrics, traces, alerts. LLM-powered apps need al…
Mastering Production Reliability: Practical Observability with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and GitHub Actions
In modern software engineering, traditional monitoring — simply knowing if a system is up or down — is no longer enough. High-velocity engineering tea…
We deployed a LangChain agent for a client and it silently failed for two weeks. Here's what we built to make sure it never happens again.
Six weeks ago, a LangChain agent we'd deployed for a B2B client started failing on roughly 30% of its sessions. No exceptions. No 500s. Nothing in the…
AI Agent Observability Runs on Conversation IDs | Focused Labs
Agent observability gets weirdly polite at the exact moment it should get nosy. It records the model call, stores the prompt, counts tokens, and then …
Something I wish someone had told me five years earlier:
LinkedIn Draft — Insight (2026-07-03) Something I wish someone had told me five years earlier: Distributed tracing: the gap between having it and usin…
Laravel Nightwatch: First-Party APM and What It Actually Replaces
Book: Decoupled PHP — Clean and Hexagonal Architecture for Applications That Outlive the Framework Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Comple…
Monitoring Costs Are Out of Control — Here's How to Fix It
The $50K/Month Monitoring Bill I audited our monitoring stack last quarter. The total cost across all tools: $52,000/month. For a company with 200 eng…
Your Agent's Retries Are Double-Charging Your Users (and Every Eval Is Green)
Your agent calls a tool. The tool times out at the network layer but actually succeeds on the server. Your harness sees no response, so it retries. No…
Log Management at Scale: How We Cut Costs 70% Without Losing Signal
$12,000/Month for Logs Nobody Reads Our logging bill was $12,000/month. We were ingesting 2TB/day. When I asked the team what percentage of logs they …
Can you build observability ingestion on S3 alone — no Kafka, no disks, no coordination layer?
TL;DR — A Kafka + Flink + OTel ingestion pipeline cost us ~$700–800/month at 10 MB/s. We rebuilt it as a single binary where the data, the write-ahead…
Tracing, Prometheus metrics, and structured logs with two decorators: Fitz vs the OpenTelemetry setup in FastAPI
For full observability in FastAPI you need 6 pip packages + 60 lines of config + manual glue between logs/spans/metrics. In Fitz it's two decorators a…
Distributed Tracing: The Missing Piece of Your Observability Stack
When Logs and Metrics Aren't Enough You have great dashboards. Your log aggregation is solid. But when a user reports "the checkout page is slow," you…
The Golden Signals: A Practical Implementation Guide
Four Metrics to Rule Them All Google's SRE book introduced the four golden signals: Latency, Traffic, Errors, and Saturation. Simple concept, but I've…
Kubernetes Observability: What to Monitor and Why
The Kubernetes Monitoring Maze Kubernetes gives you a thousand metrics out of the box. Most teams monitor all of them and understand none of them. Aft…
Humanizing Artificial Intelligence for Log Analysis: Turning Raw Server Logs Into Clear DevOps Answers
It's 2:14 a.m. and my phone is buzzing because a customer's instance won't get a floating IP. The alert is one line. The truth is somewhere in about f…