Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

How to Build and Scale Unified Asset Intelligence for AI Success

Every IT leader has felt this tension: your organization has invested in AI, automation and digital operations, and yet outcomes still fall short of expectations. Even with the right tools and intent, you won’t be able to fully realize the value of your AI investments if they’re built on an unsteady foundation.

An Agent Is Only as Good as the Baseline It Reasons Against

Every vendor in networking has an agent story right now. The useful question for an operations leader is which of those agents can plan, act, and verify against a trustworthy model of the network, and which are assistants that retrieve and suggest, then leave the decision to a person. The direction of travel is settled.

Open Models Are Closing the Gap

The frontier models have led the pack for a while now. It seems like the big players of Anthropic and OpenAI keep leapfrogging each other by a couple points in benchmark scores every other month. But, a trend we are starting to see is that open weight models are improving by leaps and bounds. They don’t hold the lead and probably won’t for a while, but the fact that open models are scaring the leaders is something to think about.

Open Source AI Agent for SRE: Why AURA Is Free

The most common question since we started 31 Days of AURA: how do you plan to make money? The short answer is the control plane, not the agent. Mezmo sells an enterprise-grade control plane for running large numbers of agents across large environments, where coordinating across environments, governance, access control, and the efficiency of preprocessing MCP data start to matter. If a hundred people run AURA and three or four of them need that, the model works. The more people running AI agents in production, the bigger the market for the tooling underneath them.

Free Open Source AI Agent for SRE and More: Why We Give AURA Away

Wondering what the catch is on a free, vendor-backed agent? There is not one in the license. AURA stays Apache 2, fully capable, and free to run. If you are weighing an open source tool with a company behind it, the first question is what the catch is. You have seen the project that turns out to be open core, or that is quietly hindered in one key way. This is Mezmo's answer for AURA.

Install an AI SRE Agent in Kubernetes with AURA and Helm

AURA does not have to live on your laptop. Install it into the cluster with Helm and it is still there the next time something breaks. AURA is a fully open source AI agent built specifically for SRE work. Rather than one general assistant, you configure workers: separate agent roles, each scoped to a job like inspecting the cluster.

The New MCP Headers Are a Gift to Gateways

In short, buried in the transport section of the MCP 2026-07-28 release candidate are three changes that matter more to infrastructure teams than to anyone else: mandatory Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name headers, cache-control-style ttlMs and cacheScope fields, and standardized W3C Trace Context propagation. Together with the stateless core, they turn MCP from a protocol that gateways had to fight into one that meets them halfway.

Skills as Guardrails: Contributing to Apache Kafka with AI, Without Knowing Every Module

Let me start with something most Kafka contributors think but rarely say out loud: nobody understands all of Kafka. I'm not a core committer and have only contributed a few times, but those contributions I have made have been in part thanks to using coding assistants. There are some issues with this approach though, the Apache Kafka project is huge. It's split into many parts: the core, the server, the client libraries, the streams engine, the storage layer, the consensus code, and more.