Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Drop a JAR on the JVM. Get distributed tracing, RxJava context propagation, log-trace correlation, and Vert.x internal metrics. No code changes. No Maven dependency. Java 8–21. Inside the design of last9/vertx-opentelemetry v2.3.4. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

In a recent webinar, The Journey to Production AI, Andre Elizondo walked through what separates a working agent demo from an agent worth trusting on a 2 a.m. page. Live polls during the session put numbers behind a pattern most platform teams already feel. ‍ ‍ Most teams are early. The ones who are further along did not get there by shipping a flashier demo. They got there by treating production AI as a platform problem.

AI promise and AI capabilities often diverge, with developers often reporting much faster code production, but not enough change in how incidents are handled. When the rate of change is faster than ever, but the rate of recovery from incidents isn’t moving, developers wind up stuck in firefighting mode. And, when these systems fail, it’s costly. According to PagerDuty’s State of AI-First Operations, over a third of surveyed companies report losing $500K per hour of downtime.

Why ECS containers collapse under service.name = aws_ecs and how to fix it for both EC2 launch type and Fargate, including the resource-vs-log-record pitfall that quietly breaks log filtering. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

What actually works for Kubernetes monitoring at scale — not what looks good in a vendor demo with a five-pod cluster.

An alert in the middle of the night warns of a potential business failure. Manual incident response becomes more complex due to the overwhelming data from distributed and dynamic digital services. With an SRE agent, your engineering team can cut through alert clutter. They can sort through various signals quicker, decreasing burnout and achieving faster, more affordable resolutions. Operational resilience will see its next evolution with Agentic AI.

LocalStack lets you run SQS, Lambda, and S3 locally in Docker — but there's a hidden trap: OpenTelemetry's default AWS propagator doesn't work with free LocalStack. Here's how to set up end-to-end local testing with working trace propagation. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.

SQS doesn't propagate trace context automatically. You instrument both sides, deploy, and get two disconnected traces. This post shows how to wire them into one waterfall — and the ESM format gotcha that silently breaks it every time. Prathamesh works as an evangelist at Last9, runs SRE stories - where SRE and DevOps folks share their stories, and maintains o11y.wiki - a glossary of all terms related to observability.