Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This month, we’re thrilled to see OpenAI using the VictoriaMetrics Stack internally — including VictoriaMetrics, VictoriaLogs, and VictoriaTraces — in their Harness engineering experiment, as shown in their architecture diagram. It’s a great way of combining observability and AI agents.

As we gear up for Grafana 13, the next major release of the open source data visualization platform that we’ll announce at GrafanaCON this April, our engineering team is still shipping some powerful new features along the way. Case in point: Grafana 12.4 is officially here, and there’s a lot to be excited about. The latest minor release includes a ton of updates that help you build and design dashboards faster than ever, as well as manage and scale those dashboards seamlessly over time.

AI coding assistants are transforming how developers write software. Tools like Windsurf can generate entire modules, refactor complex code, and fix bugs in seconds. But speed comes with a tradeoff: AI-generated code can introduce subtle bugs, security vulnerabilities, or breaking changes that slip past even experienced developers. That’s where continuous integration comes in. CI acts as a safety net, automatically testing every change before it reaches production.

Compliance audits used to be annual fire drills. Teams would scramble for weeks gathering screenshots, pulling logs, and hoping nothing slipped through the cracks. That approach no longer works when regulations like GDPR and HIPAA require continuous documentation and real-time evidence of security controls. Website monitoring tools designed for compliance have evolved to address this reality, automating evidence collection and flagging issues before auditors ever arrive.

The “works on my machine” era is officially over. Nix is changing the way we think about software by treating packages as functional, immutable values, ensuring that a build works exactly the same way every time, on every machine. But while Nix excels on a local laptop, scaling that level of reproducibility across a global enterprise has historically been a challenge.

I was looking at our Claude Code spend in the Anthropic console the other day. Aggregate cost, aggregate tokens — no breakdown by developer, no breakdown by session. I knew my Hackathon team had been using it heavily on building out new features for the OpenTelemetry Distro Builder. But heavily how? I had no idea. Turns out Claude Code has been emitting OpenTelemetry signals the whole time. Per-session cost, token counts, every tool call it makes on your codebase.

Over the past few years, Digital Employee Experience (DEX) has moved from emerging concept to essential capability for modern IT organizations. The conversation has changed. IT is no longer measured only by system uptime or ticket resolution. Today, success is defined by how technology actually performs for employees — and how consistently organizations can deliver productive, friction-free digital work.

In 2024, Civo acquired Konstruct (formerly Kubefirst) to reinforce our commitment to simplifying cloud computing complexities. When this acquisition was made, it began a whole new chapter for the team behind Konstruct. Over the years, we assembled our team by working with a community of thousands of engineers in what can be a very complex cloud native environment. We were fortunate to join forces with Civo as they aligned with our cloud native and portable vision.

Every year, Honeycomb runs disaster recovery scenarios in multiple environments, including in production. Although each of our instances runs in a single region, on at least three Availability Zones (AZs), we have multiple plans for partial regional failures, and particularly, zonal failures. One of these tests was run on December 5th, and after its successful completion came its cleanup steps.