https://ynden.tech/blog/ Notes on observability, reliability, and the stuff that breaks at 3am. en-us https://ynden.tech/blog/ai-sre-is-a-gartner-category-now/ https://ynden.tech/blog/ai-sre-is-a-gartner-category-now/ Gartner published its first AI SRE Market Guide in January. The tech is real. The way most teams plan to deploy it will turn a blip into an outage. Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/token-spend-is-a-cloud-line-item/ https://ynden.tech/blog/token-spend-is-a-cloud-line-item/ An agent stuck in a retry loop can burn $40k overnight, and you'll find out from the invoice. Put the meter on the span. Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/otel-won-now-the-hard-part/ https://ynden.tech/blog/otel-won-now-the-hard-part/ OpenTelemetry graduated from the CNCF in May. The standards war is over. Operating the Collector is the new problem. Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/ebpf-for-breadth-sdks-for-depth/ https://ynden.tech/blog/ebpf-for-breadth-sdks-for-depth/ Beyla became an official OpenTelemetry project. Zero-touch instrumentation is real now, but it doesn't replace your SDKs and the vendor who built it says so. Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/ai-amplifies-your-worst-pipeline/ https://ynden.tech/blog/ai-amplifies-your-worst-pipeline/ The DORA 2025 data is blunt about it. AI raised your throughput and your change-failure risk at the same time. Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/store-everything-aggregate-nothing/ https://ynden.tech/blog/store-everything-aggregate-nothing/ Observability 2.0 isn't a vibe. ClickHouse runs a 100PB stack on it and published the CPU math to prove it. Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/otel-profiling-fourth-signal/ https://ynden.tech/blog/otel-profiling-fourth-signal/ Continuous profiling just became an official OpenTelemetry signal. The honest buy-or-wait call for a Series B-D team. Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/youre-not-logging-requests-youre-tracing-agents/ https://ynden.tech/blog/youre-not-logging-requests-youre-tracing-agents/ Ship an LLM agent and the request log stops being the unit of observability. The trace tree is. Most teams find out the hard way. Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/cloudflare-aws-outages-config-lessons/ https://ynden.tech/blog/cloudflare-aws-outages-config-lessons/ Cloudflare and AWS didn't fall over from too much traffic. A bad config and an empty DNS record did it. Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/datadog-logs-billed-twice/ https://ynden.tech/blog/datadog-logs-billed-twice/ You pay to send the log. Then you pay again to make it searchable. That's where the bill shock comes from. Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/why-your-platform-team-shipped-nothing/ https://ynden.tech/blog/why-your-platform-team-shipped-nothing/ Fourteen months, three engineers, a 400-line golden path two teams use. Platforms fail on politics, not tech, when you optimize for the 20% edge cases. Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/outage-costs-more-than-series-b/ https://ynden.tech/blog/outage-costs-more-than-series-b/ A 4-hour outage knocked $8M off a term sheet because nobody had the number. The hidden downtime costs that never show up in your MTTR report. Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/llm-costs-more-to-observe/ https://ynden.tech/blog/llm-costs-more-to-observe/ One team paid $8k to run a RAG chatbot and $89k to log it. AI observability breaks traditional APM. Here's how to instrument LLMs without going broke. Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/why-your-team-cant-kill-datadog/ https://ynden.tech/blog/why-your-team-cant-kill-datadog/ One team tried to kill Datadog and ended up with Datadog, Grafana Cloud, and New Relic, 40% over budget. Tool sprawl is a leadership problem, not a tech one. Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/your-sres-arent-burned-out-theyre-gone/ https://ynden.tech/blog/your-sres-arent-burned-out-theyre-gone/ On-call doesn't just burn SREs out, it pushes them into PM roles for a 40% bump and no pages. Each departure costs $150k+. Fixing on-call costs less. Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/sre-search-taking-too-long/ https://ynden.tech/blog/sre-search-taking-too-long/ Hiring a senior SRE who can read code takes 3-6 months and $200k+. Here's what to do about the 90-day gap while you search for that unicorn. Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/observability-bill-lying-to-you/ https://ynden.tech/blog/observability-bill-lying-to-you/ One user_id tag took a Datadog bill from $2k to $47k. High-cardinality tags multiply your metric series. Here's how to set an observability budget. Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/otel-broke-our-prod-again/ https://ynden.tech/blog/otel-broke-our-prod-again/ An OTel SDK bump from 1.28 to 2.1 caused a 3-hour outage. Why OpenTelemetry upgrades silently break prod and how to test the upgrade path first. Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/observability-budget-conversation/ https://ynden.tech/blog/observability-budget-conversation/ Finance flagged your Datadog spend? Tie telemetry to revenue, use tail-based sampling, and cut retention. How to defend the budget that actually matters. Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/what-to-look-for-sre-hire/ https://ynden.tech/blog/what-to-look-for-sre-hire/ Most SRE postings are 23-bullet wishlists nobody meets. The hire that matters can read your app code and instrument OTel, not just move YAML. Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/3am-page-that-shouldnt-have-happened/ https://ynden.tech/blog/3am-page-that-shouldnt-have-happened/ Most alerts page you about CPU and memory, not whether checkout works. Switch to SLO-based alerting and stop losing sleep over garbage. Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/otel-usability-gap-nobody-fixed/ https://ynden.tech/blog/otel-usability-gap-nobody-fixed/ A solid engineer spent three weeks adding tracing and still failed. OpenTelemetry nailed the hard tech but the usability is rough. Start with one path. Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/your-best-engineers-are-stuck-firefighting/ https://ynden.tech/blog/your-best-engineers-are-stuck-firefighting/ Your senior engineers burn 30% of their time on incidents because the system needs tribal knowledge to debug. That's $50k-$75k each, in salary alone. Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/the-hero-problem/ https://ynden.tech/blog/the-hero-problem/ Your 10x engineer is a single point of failure. When the one who holds the system in their head leaves, 20-minute fixes become 4-hour outages. Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/five-dashboards-to-debug-one-request/ https://ynden.tech/blog/five-dashboards-to-debug-one-request/ Multi-cloud observability means jumping CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and GCP to chase one request. Here's how to get a real single pane of glass. Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/the-war-room-is-burning-money/ https://ynden.tech/blog/the-war-room-is-burning-money/ Eight senior engineers in a war room for four hours runs $4,500 a pop, and most teams do it weekly. Distributed tracing turns that into 30 seconds. Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/alert-fatigue-killed-our-oncall/ https://ynden.tech/blog/alert-fatigue-killed-our-oncall/ 82% of orgs have MTTR over an hour and noise is the reason. Kill threshold alerts, switch to SLO burn-rate alerting, and let on-call sleep again. Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/series-b-infrastructure-duct-tape/ https://ynden.tech/blog/series-b-infrastructure-duct-tape/ You scaled to 23 microservices and nobody can draw how they connect. The fix for Series B observability isn't a rewrite, it's distributed tracing. Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/ebpf-isnt-magic/ https://ynden.tech/blog/ebpf-isnt-magic/ Two years of eBPF observability in prod: the ARM64 breakage, the BPFDoor security risk, and when traditional OTel instrumentation just wins. Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/board-doesnt-care-about-uptime/ https://ynden.tech/blog/board-doesnt-care-about-uptime/ Your board hears nines, they think dollars. Learn to report downtime as lost revenue so you actually get observability budget approved. Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/why-your-mttr-got-worse/ https://ynden.tech/blog/why-your-mttr-got-worse/ 82% of companies now take over an hour to resolve incidents. More tools made you slower. The fix isn't adding a tool, it's removing three. Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/soc2-audit-observability-gaps/ https://ynden.tech/blog/soc2-audit-observability-gaps/ SOC2 auditors don't care about dashboards. They want proof you'd detect a data breach, an audit trail 6 months back, and an MTTR you can explain. Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/managing-50-microservices/ https://ynden.tech/blog/managing-50-microservices/ Trace context dies at Kafka, everyone names attributes differently, and the OTel collector silently drops spans. Hard lessons from 50+ microservices. Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT https://ynden.tech/blog/why-your-dashboards-lie/ https://ynden.tech/blog/why-your-dashboards-lie/ Your payment service can return 200 OK with a failed body. All green dashboards, 40 support tickets. Instrument business outcomes, not HTTP calls. Sat, 20 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT