Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AI SRE is making real strides in resolving some of the greatest pains related to incident response, troubleshooting, and complex root cause analysis. The on-call rotation, the war room, the week-long RCA, and the ticket queue that ate a third of every platform engineer’s week all look different now than they did two years ago.

AI cost monitoring is the continuous tracking of AI and LLM spend in real time, broken down by the models, features, teams, and customers generating it. It is not the same as reading the monthly bill - done well, it shows spend as it happens, flags anomalies before they become invoices, and connects every dollar to an outcome so finance can protect AI ROI instead of explaining it after the fact.

Agentic AI cost is what you pay to run AI agents, and it is mostly tokens. An agent does not answer once. It loops, calls tools, reads the results, and reasons again, re-sending a growing context every step. Anthropic found agents use about 4x the tokens of a chat, and multi-agent systems about 15x. You control it by capping runs, right-sizing the architecture, routing, caching, and measuring cost per task, then tying every agent to the AI ROI it produces.

Observing fast-growing agentic workloads is no small feat, especially if you try to build your own monitoring stack or rely solely on tools built for a time before LLMs. At Grafana Labs, we know this all too well.

If you haven’t heard about our MCP server, you should really check it out. It’s probably the best way to give your agents access to the power of GitKraken’s integrations and features. Our MCP tools also help your agents understand your codebase in a way that we think lowers your token usage and improves their output.

In April, Anthropic disclosed that its new AI model, Claude Mythos, had found a vulnerability in OpenBSD that survived 27 years of human review. Mozilla used the same model to find 271 security flaws in Firefox in a single evaluation pass.

At AppSignal, we love talking to our customers to learn how they're using the product. Recently, one of them showed us something worth sharing: with a single chat prompt, his AI agent searches production logs, closes incidents, and checks whether a pull request has shipped. Automating that kind of work turned out to be a matter of building the right agent skill.

MCP servers have a reputation: they eat your context window. CLIs paired with skills, on the other hand, are more token efficient. But is this still true? I dropped all my MCP servers five months ago. Five months is a long time in AI land. When Anthropic came up with the concept of skills, many people stopped using MCP servers in favor of CLI tooling and skills.