Observability and human intuition in an AI world
In this two for one episode recorded at HumanX, Ryan is first joined by Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb, to discuss how AI compresses the software development lifecycle, making observability about capturing the right telemetry. Then, Spiros Xanthos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, shares with us how AI coding increases code volume but decreases human intuition, making production operations harder than ever.
Episode notes:
Honeycomb is an observability platform that enables deep, high-dimensional exploration so you can debug unpredictable behavior with precision.
Resolve AI allows you to resolve incidents, optimize costs, and code with production context using AI that works across your code, infrastructure, and telemetry.
Connect with Christine on LinkedIn.
Connect with Spiros on LinkedIn.
TRANSCRIPT
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What’s Driving the Rising Cost of Observability?
Observability is expensive because traditional tools weren’t designed for the complexity and scale of modern cloud-native systems, explains Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb.io. Logging tools, while flexible, were optimized for manual, human-scale data reading. This approach struggles with the massive scale of today’s software, making logging slow and resource-intensive. Monitoring tools, with their dashboards and metrics, prioritized speed over flexibility, which doesn’t align with the dynamic nature of containerized microservices. Similarly, traditional APM tools relied on “magical” setups tailored for consistent application environments like Rails, but they falter in modern polyglot infrastructures with diverse frameworks.
Additionally, observability costs are rising due to evolving demands from DevOps, platform engineering, and site reliability engineering (SRE). Practices like service-level objectives (SLOs) emphasize end-user experience, pushing teams to track meaningful metrics. However, outdated observability tools often hinder this, forcing teams to cut back on crucial data. Yen highlights the potential of AI and innovations like OpenTelemetry to address these challenges.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest trends in observability:
Honeycomb.io’s Austin Parker: OpenTelemetry In-Depth
Observability in 2025: OpenTelemetry and AI to Fill In Gaps
Observability and AI: New Connections at KubeCon
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Observability is for your unknown unknowns (Interview)
Christine Yen (co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb) joined the show to talk about her upcoming talk at Strange Loop titled “Observability: Superpowers for Developers.” We talk practically about observability and how it delivers on these superpowers. We also cover the biggest hurdles to observability, the cultural shifts needed in teams to implement observability, and even the gains the entire organization can enjoy when you deliver high-quality code and you’re able to respond to system failure with resilience.
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GoCD + Kubernetes – With GoCD running on Kubernetes, you define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly. GoCD installs as a Kubernetes native application. Scale your build infrastructure elastically. Learn more at gocd.org/kubernetes
CrossBrowserTesting – The ONLY all-in-one testing platform that can run automated, visual, and manual UI tests – on thousands of real desktops and mobile browsers.
Strange Loop – A conference for software developers in St. Louis, MO. covering programming languages, databases, distributed systems, security, machine learning, creativity, and more! Sep 12-14, 2019 / Oct 1-3, 2020 / Sep 30-Oct 2, 2021
Featuring:
Christine Yen – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
“testing is for known knowns, monitoring is for known unknowns, observability is for unknown unknowns” – Jez Humble
Check out Strange Loops’ impressive lineup of speakers this year
Observability: Superpowers for Developers
Framework for an observability maturity model
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!