AI Observability, Part 2: The Grounding Layer
RAG systems fail silently when retrieval breaks. Learn to monitor Azure AI Search, vector stores, and the retrieval pipeline that feeds your models.
Operations
Modern Service Management
Modern service management approaches that embrace agility while maintaining reliability. Moving beyond traditional ITIL to operational excellence.
What You'll Find Here
The operational landscape has fundamentally changed. Traditional ITIL processes that worked in the past now create bottlenecks. These posts explore how to build operational practices that support modern, agile organizations while maintaining reliability and resilience.
Topics covered:
- Modern service management transformation
- AI and intelligent operations
- Incident response and blameless culture
- Automation and self-service
- Platform operations and SRE
- Change management evolution
Latest Operations Posts
Chaos Engineering on Azure: Controlled Vandalism
Skip the Netflix-scale chaos. Learn to start chaos engineering in Azure with simple, safe experiments that actually improve your systems without breaking production.
Azure Workbooks: Custom Dashboards That Don't Suck
Stop building useless dashboards. Learn to create Azure Workbooks that actually help your team make decisions and solve problems faster.
AI Observability, Part 1: The Model Layer
Stop monitoring AI infrastructure like web servers. Learn to instrument Azure OpenAI with queries that reveal token consumption, content filters, and cost attribution.
KQL for Infrastructure Teams - Beyond Basic Queries
Master KQL from an infrastructure perspective. Learn to write queries that solve real operational problems, from capacity planning to incident response.
Monitoring Foundation: The Reference Implementation
Deploy the Beyond Azure Monitor patterns as infrastructure code. Complete monitoring stack with intelligent alerts, workbooks, and ITSM integration.
Beyond Azure Monitor - Part 3: Building Production-Ready Monitoring Solutions
Transform advanced KQL patterns into production monitoring systems with automation, intelligent alerting, and integration strategies that scale across enterprise environments.
Beyond Azure Monitor - Part 2: Advanced KQL Patterns for Real-World Monitoring
Master advanced KQL techniques for correlation analysis, anomaly detection, and building monitoring queries that connect the dots across your entire infrastructure.
Beyond Azure Monitor - Part 1: The Reality of Enterprise Monitoring
Azure Monitor is just the starting point. Real enterprise monitoring requires custom solutions, advanced KQL, and architectural thinking beyond the basics.
You've Always Been Hybrid
Organizations ask 'are we hybrid or not?' as if it's a strategic decision they haven't made yet. The answer is yes. The question is whether you're operating like it.
Confidence Engineering - Part 3: Adoption Déjà Vu
You'll build the instrumentation. Leadership will nod at the dashboard. Then nothing will happen. The same organizational failure that killed SRE adoption.
Confidence Engineering - Part 2: The Practice
A framework for building confidence in AI-enabled systems through observable criteria, instrumentation, and staged authority expansion. Theory meets practice.
Confidence Engineering - Part 1: Why the Trust Discourse Is Sabotaging Itself
Stop asking if you can trust AI. Start building confidence in systems you understand. The trust discourse is sabotaging adoption with the wrong frame.
Bicep vs Terraform: The 4K TV Playing VHS Tapes
You bought a 4K smart TV to play VHS tapes. Why Azure-only shops keep choosing tools that solve problems they dont have.
Platform Resiliency - Part 1: The Promise That Couldnt Travel
Why SRE adoption failed outside Google and what we learned from attempting to transplant a complete system rather than adapting principles to organizational reality.
Platform Resiliency - Part 2: The Promise That Can
How to implement resiliency as a design principle woven into platform architecture, with practical guidance for operations teams and AI integration.
Platform Resiliency - Part 3: Promises Made, Promises Kept
Practical steps to implement Platform Resiliency on Monday morning - from drawing clear boundaries to enforcing standards through the platform.
Operational Change - Part 2: The Operations Waterline
Large language models changed AIOps from expensive vendor theater to genuine operational intelligence that can absorb the toil.
Operational Change - Part 1: The Translation Problem
The shift from monitoring servers to observing user experience isn't obvious until a cloud-native customer exposes your blind spots.