Observability in the AI Era with New Relic's Nic Benders

About this episode

The episode discusses the challenges of observability in the era of AI-generated software with insights from Nic Benders of New Relic.

What happens when nobody wrote the code running in your production environment? As AI-generated software becomes standard practice, platform engineers face a new challenge: operating systems without experts to consult. Nic Benders, Chief Technical Strategist at New Relic, has spent 15 years watching observability evolve from basic server monitoring to understanding complex distributed systems. Now he's tackling the next frontier: how to maintain and operate software when there's no human author to ask why something was built a certain way. The conversation covers the shift from instrumentation being the hard problem to understanding being the bottleneck. Nic explains why inventory matters more than you think, how to approach AI-generated code as a black box that needs testing and telemetry, and why "garbage in, safety out" should be your new mantra. You'll learn practical strategies for instrumenting modern systems with OpenTelemetry, why your observability hierarchy needs to start with knowing what's actually running, and how to build platforms that make safe deployment easier than risky shortcuts. Nic also shares his perspective on technical drift versus technical debt and what…

People in this episode

Host: Cory O'Daniel

Guest: Nic Benders

Topics covered

• observability
• AI-generated software
• platform engineering
• OpenTelemetry
• technical debt
• instrumentation

Keywords

• observability
• AI
• platform engineering
• OpenTelemetry
• technical drift
• software testing
• distributed systems

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: New Relic

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