Al Brown

Synthetic monitoring runs scripted probes (HTTP checks, API transactions, browser journeys) on a schedule from controlled locations to catch outages before users do.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) applies software engineering to operations problems, using SLOs, error budgets, a 50% toil cap, and blameless postmortems to keep systems reliable.

Shadow AI is the use of AI tools and models inside an organization without IT or governance approval. It drives data leakage, unbudgeted spend, and compliance exposure, and detecting it is an observability problem.

Real user monitoring (RUM) passively collects performance and experience telemetry from real user sessions. How it works, what it captures, and how to store it at scale.

Platform engineering is the discipline of building internal developer platforms (IDPs) that give product teams self-service infrastructure through golden paths, reducing cognitive load.

MELT groups telemetry into metrics, events, logs, and traces. What each type captures, how events differ from logs, and how MELT relates to the three pillars of observability.