Publications

Open source development thrives on remixing existing projects to solve new problems. The author reflects on years of finding projects that almost meet requirements, forking them, and contributing improvements back to the community. Experience running open source programs at Cisco and working with OpenTelemetry demonstrated that successful projects extend beyond code itself. Decisions about licensing, what to publish, and how projects evolve matter tremendously. The field has accumulated substantial guidance on these questions through established resources. ...

The author attended Vercel Ship conferences and noticed “observability” featured prominently in keynotes. After learning about Eve, Vercel’s new framework for “durable, filesystem-first AI agents,” the author decided to build a practical project combining Eve with OpenTelemetry and Bronto monitoring. The concrete challenge involved tracking technology events and Call for Papers deadlines scattered across multiple websites. This task required an agent capable of pulling from various feeds, reading details, categorizing events, and integrating with Slack and Jira for team coordination. ...

I’ve been in the observability space long enough, through OpenTelemetry, by seeing and doing dozens of vendor pitches and enough “AI-powered” demos to last a lifetime. So I have a clear idea about what a company needs to be successful in this area, and what would actually make me passionate about working for one. Read the full article on Bronto Blog

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

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

This entry has moved to the videos section.

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

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

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. ...

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