Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we'll be looking at ways we can spot ads disguised as recommendations in today's influencer era. These days, it's getting harder for me to distinguish between an ad and a recommendation.

Bare-metal. Just reading that word might trigger a physical reaction for some of us. Dusty closets, old server rooms, and loud rigs that never seemed to work quite right. Remember waiting days for IT to provision a server, only to realize your ticket got lost in the shuffle? Or the classic "well, it worked on my machine" excuse right before a production push? Ah, the good old days.

Colsubsidio is one of the largest and most representative family compensation funds in Colombia. The organization manages and delivers essential social services to millions of users through a broad network spanning health, education, subsidies, recreation, tourism, credit, housing, pharmacies, retail supply, culture, and labor welfare.

No one has time to watch dashboards all day. Alerts exist to tell us when something goes wrong or is starting to go wrong, so we can act early. In theory, it sounds simple. Define a rule, set a threshold, get notified when it is crossed. In practice, it rarely works that smoothly.

At incident.io we run a deliberately simple technology stack. Keeping things boring has allowed us to scale from a few hundred customers to several thousand, while having only two platform engineers. In this post I'll walk through the stack, explain some of the choices we've made, and touch on the challenges we're facing as we grow.

Middleware is evolving beyond invisible plumbing into a strategic Command Center. The future demands unified management, predictive intelligence, and transaction-centric operations to move from reactive firefighting to operational mastery in 2026.

Achieving end-to-end observability for applications is a top priority for organizations today, but instrumenting for both frontend and backend monitoring can be a significant hurdle. What complicates matters is that the SREs and DevOps teams responsible for deploying monitoring tools typically don’t own frontend code or have the context needed to safely modify it.

To succeed in the AI era, customers need fast, easy access to security solutions that can harness the power of agentic AI and deliver business outcomes. They need seamless access to their data for faster threat detection, simpler incident response, and reduced risk. They need technology vendors to work together and not in silos.

For a CTO, "four nines" represents a commitment to keeping production revenue live with less than 0.01% of total downtime per year. As AI workloads move from pilot projects into core production services, the reliability requirements for infrastructure have shifted. AI agents, RAG pipelines, and automated LLM workflows depend on a consistent platform state.

During high-priority incidents, SRE teams frequently lose critical time switching between monitoring platforms and ticketing systems. Context switching like this forces engineers to manually update incident states by copying and pasting data. The inevitable result is increased risk of information gaps and slower Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).