IT Ops Query

LLMs vs AIOps: have we seen this movie before?

Gartner analyst Gregg Siegfried reflects on the previous generation of AIOps tools that never quite lived up to their "NoOps" promise, looks at how generative AI tools have already affected IT ops pros' day to day work, and predicts the ways AI agents are poised to even more dramatically alter the observability and IT automation landscape.

The 'What-Ifs' of generative AI

Mark Tomlinson is senior director of performance and observability for digital payments provider FreedomPay. He previously worked for PayPal and also served as Chief Performacologist, founder and host of the PerfBytes podcast from 2012 to 2023. He talks about how his company uses generative AI tools in its observability practices, imagines the future possibilities for agentic AI ... and just as importantly, explains what a "Performacologist" is.

Generative AI and the next AIOps frontier

Alois Reitbauer is chief technology strategist, head of open source and the leader of research at observability vendor Dynatrace. He is a contributor to CNCF open source standards such as the Keptn event-driven orchestration project and OpenFeature for feature flag management. His Dynatrace bio also describes him as "a regular conference speaker, blogger, book author and sushi maniac." He reflects on the evolution of AIOps before and after generative AI, and discusses the work still being done to help large language models better generate infrastructure code in response to incidents.

OpenTelemetry in the age of AI

The rise of generative and agentic AI is also OpenTelemetry's moment to shine – in an increasingly non-deterministic world, there's a lot to be said for a standard means of collecting telemetry data about system behavior. However, it can be difficult to get a consensus on everything, especially developers' preferences about instrumenting code.
This week's guest, Austin Parker, was among the original founding members of the OpenTelemetry project and remains a core contributor, as well as a member of the project's governance board. He explores the multiple intersections between the maturing open source observability standard and emerging AI technology, what's on the project's roadmap and shares his own experiences using generative AI to develop apps.

Envisioning observability in 3D with knowledge graphs

What if you could see your application and infrastructure represented spatially instead of two-dimensional dashboard tabs, similar to atoms in a molecule or stars in the sky? According to Matt Young, founder and co-chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) technical advisory group (TAG) on observability, this will soon be a reality thanks to advanced AI models, knowledge graphs, and emerging data storage techniques such as columnar stores. In this episode, Matt discusses the implications of these new technologies for SREs, developers, and software supply chain security.

Charity Majors on AI observability and a call to action for SREs

Charity Majors pioneered the term 'observability' as co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, based on her experience building and managing distributed systems at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of the O'Reilly books Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering. Her Honeycomb bio adds that she "loves free speech, free software and single malt scotch."
In this interview with Informa TechTarget senior news writer Beth Pariseau, Majors covers the interplay between AI and observability, "Observability 2.0," and urges site reliability engineers to lean into AI agents, even if they seem to be replacements.

Trailer: IT Ops Query Season 3: Observability in the Age of AI

Multifaceted connection points are emerging between observability and AI, from monitoring and improving AI models themselves to observing the ways the behavior of AI agents differs from traditional web apps. In short, AI-driven automation makes new kinds of observability workflows both necessary and possible.
This season of IT Ops Query will feature interviews with a variety of industry expert guests on how AI, including agentic AI, will change observability, as well as how observability will change AI. Join me starting March 20th, wherever you get your podcasts.

2024 in review and 2025 predictions with Dan Lorenc

Sigstore creator, Chainguard CEO, OpenSSF TAC member and Season 1 guest Dan Lorenc returns to discuss the year in open source and security. Topics range from software supply chain management, hardening container images and SBOMs in limbo to open product companies and business models, including his own company's shift in focus this year. Plus: a look ahead to SecOps and AI in 2025. 

The arc of SecOps is long, but bends toward improvement

S&P Global Market Intelligence principal research analyst Daniel Kennedy discusses what the results of his Voice of the Enterprise research project dating back to 2015 reveal about the notion of a cybersecurity skills shortage; the effects of the Crowdstrike outage on a long-running debate about unified cybersecurity platforms vs best-of-breed vendors; and hopeful signs heading in to the next decade of SecOps. 

Back to the future in business resilience post-CrowdStrike

SecOps, developers and infrastructure ops teams are often encouraged to work more closely together within IT, but for one industry analyst, the CrowdStrike outage exposed an even more significant gap between IT and businesses. 
Charles Betz is vice president and principal analyst for enterprise architecture at Forrester Research. He has also worked as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and as an enterprise architect at AT&T, Wells Fargo, Best Buy and Target. Following the CrowdStrike outage, Betz and a dozen other Forrester analysts collaborated on a report calling for a redefinition of enterprise resilience in the wake of the incident.
For Betz, the experience of Delta Airlines in the CrowdStrike aftermath is potentially instructive for improving business resilience. 
"This was not a failure of IT disaster recovery," he said in this episode of Delta's weeklong ordeal. "This was truly a failure of business continuity…a shock to the physical system that couldn't be unwound without a lot of hard work."