Publications

Reliability Is Managed In Services, But Felt In Transactions

Modern reliability practice is excellent at making complex systems operable at the service level, but users experience reliability at the level of end-to-end transactions and flows. This post explores why that gap exists and what it means for how we measure and manage reliability. Read the full article on Causely Blog

How to Turn Slow Queries into Actionable Reliability Metrics with OpenTelemetry

Slow SQL queries degrade user experience, cause cascading failures, and turn simple operations into production incidents. Instead of collecting more telemetry for its own sake, this guide shows how to turn OpenTelemetry database spans into span-derived metrics you can actually act on. Read the full article on Causely Blog

Why a Major AI Incident Is Coming in 2026

This entry has moved to the videos section.

Alerts Aren’t the Investigation

PagerDuty fires: CheckoutAPI burn rate (2m/1h). Grafana shows p99 going from ~120ms to ~900ms. Retries doubled. DB CPU is flat, but checkout pods are throttling and a downstream dependency’s error budget is evaporating. Read the full article on Causely Blog

Thank You, FluxCD: How it helps us, and how you can use it too!

The second post in our “thank you” series. FluxCD is what takes “the desired state in git” and makes it true in our clusters, repeatedly. It’s the heartbeat behind our weekly releases. Read the full article on Causely Blog

When the Hunt Feels Good: Fixing the Incentives in Incident Response

Every on-call engineer knows the hunt: a late-night incident where you chase down a mysterious failure, clue by clue, until you finally pin down the culprit. There’s real craft in that work: staying calm, forming hypotheses, ruling things out, communicating clearly, and bringing customers back to safety. When it’s over, the afterglow is real: a mix of pride, relief, and the feeling of being useful when it mattered. And yet, the same incident that becomes a great story is rarely a great night. It costs sleep, weekends, and family plans. Most people don’t love the disruption. They love the moment when a hard problem finally makes sense. The trap is subtle: because the story is vivid and the relief is rewarding, the reactive hunt can end up feeling more visible than the quieter work that would have prevented the incident in the first place. ...

Drinking the OTel SODA: Send Observability Data Anywhere

With community-standard instrumentation and the OTel Collector, your metrics, logs, and traces are no longer trapped in a walled garden. Originally posted to the ClickHouse blog. Read the full article on ClickHouse Blog

Do You Even Need Kubernetes for Reliable Service Delivery?

Kubernetes has become the default backbone of cloud native architecture. But does it actually help you ship services more reliably, or is it just more moving parts?

Thank You, Grafana: How Beyla Helped Us, and How You Can Use it Too!

By open-sourcing eBPF-based auto-instrumentation and then donating it as an OpenTelemetry BPF Instrumentation (OBI) project, Grafana didn’t just release code, they lowered the onramp for observability. Read the full article on Causely Blog

Reflections on APMdigests Observability Series — and Where We Go Next

Whether we call it APM or observability is bikeshedding. What really matters is ensuring systems deliver the service levels users expect. That’s where AI comes in. Read the full article on Causely Blog