Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Adam Berman, VP of Engineering at Semgrep, on the double edge of AI tools for engineering leaders: they compress the distance between an idea and a working prototype, letting him get from exploration to a demoable POC in the gaps between meetings. But that same leverage amplifies risk. One person can spin up 1,000 unowned problems just as fast as they can spin up 1,000 wins. From a Braintrust by Cortex conversation on how AI is changing the job of engineering leadership.

This week's Feature Friday: Principal Product Manager Christine Byun walks through KPI cards, a new way to build custom dashboards in Engineering Intelligence. KPI cards pull key metrics, like change failure rate and rollback frequency, into compact tiles so they stay visible without taking up chart space. That means the metric you're actively working, incidents, in this demo, gets full-size room, without losing sight of the rest of your system.

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.

Steve Flanders (Senior Director of Engineering, Splunk) makes the case that AI can't save an observability stack that never agreed on a standard. Mix formats across metrics and logs, and AI stops correlating and starts guessing, which means you either make the wrong call or miss the answer you actually needed. OpenTelemetry is one fix, but Prometheus and Fluentd work too. The standard matters more than which one you pick.

OpenTelemetry instrumentation used to mean hours of manual work, wiring up metrics service by service. Now you can just ask for it. Tell an AI agent what you're trying to observe, something like "add OpenTelemetry so I can track this application's performance," and it turns that into an intent specification, then enriches your existing code with instrumentation to match. OpenTelemetry is open source and on GitHub. Pairing it with an AI agent that actually understands your codebase is what turns "add some metrics" into instrumentation that's useful.

Search in Catalog used to mean typing an exact name and hoping. Lead Platform Engineer Keith Zeto walks through the rebuild for this Feature Friday.

Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta sits down with Abby Bangser, a platform engineering leader at Syntasso and former lead of the CNCF Platforms Working Group, to talk about why AI agents need real platform APIs, not raw cloud credentials.

Agents are writing more of the code these days, but that doesn't make them the only user of your platform. Abby Bangser, Principal Engineer at Syntasso and CNCF Ambassador, makes the distinction: the agent might be your primary coder, while humans are still validating what it builds and interacting with the system it runs on. From a Braintrust conversation with engineering leaders on AI agents and engineering operations.

Centralized ops creates a single point of failure: every request waits in line, and your best engineers spend their day gatekeeping instead of building. Self-service APIs change that. Developers get what they need without filing a ticket, and platform teams get their time back for the infrastructure work that actually moves the needle. Still routing everything through one central team? Tell us your setup in the comments.

Filtering in Engineering Intelligence just got a lot more precise. In this Feature Friday, Principal Product Manager Christine Byun walks through the enhanced filters now live across the platform, using PR cycle time in the Data Explorer as an example. What's new: Try it out in Engineering Intelligence today.