Observability

This was a week where the AI race got tangibly closer to your desktop, the Kubernetes ecosystem said goodbye to an old friend, and the observability world kept tightening its grip around OpenTelemetry as the universal standard. If you only have five minutes, the headlines are: GPT-5.4 can now operate your computer better than most humans, Ingress NGINX is officially done, and Google Cloud now speaks fluent OTLP. AI & Machine Learning OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 with native computer use — and it beats human performance. OpenAI’s latest frontier model isn’t just another benchmark bump. GPT-5.4 is the first general-purpose model to ship with production-ready computer use capabilities, scoring 75.0% on OSWorld-Verified desktop tasks — above the 72.4% human expert baseline. It supports up to 1M tokens of context, brings a new “reasoning plan preview” that lets users steer the model mid-thought, and introduces tool search for navigating large ecosystems of APIs and connectors. Available in ChatGPT (as GPT-5.4 Thinking), Codex, and the API. The agentic future just got a lot more concrete. Source: OpenAI ...

Background Grafana has become the de-facto visualization tool for Prometheus. While it is cool to run a central Grafana hooked up to an RDS database, I think it is even better if you can make Grafana completely configurable via git and thus have stateless Grafana instances which you can scale horizontally. Based on this philosophy, I have been running a Grafana setup at Red Hat, here’s some key points: Grafana runs as pods on a Kubernetes (OpenShift) cluster Each dashboard is mounted into the pod via ConfigMap Our GitOps pipeline takes care of adding the dashboard configmaps into the namespace, so all dashboards and their changes ultimately must end up in Git One of the best benefits of this approach is that you never have to worry about Grafana upgrades/downgrades. Because the pods are stateless, you can simply roll out a new version as long as the dashboard schema stays consistent. ...

What is Prometheus If you’re an engineer working with Cloud technologies, chances are that you’ve already heard of Prometheus Prometheus is an Open Source monitoring tool. Its development started at SoundCloud and it has now evolved into being a go-to choice for metrics collection. I often relate its rise in popularity to its simple, gitops friendly configuration management, simple setup and modularity. Prometheus does a few things and does it well. While doing this, it does have some nice modularity as you can mix and match it with other tooling such as Grafana and Alertmanager. ...