Code RED

Abdel Sghiouar, Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Google and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon co-chair, joins Kasper Borg Nissen to discuss what’s changing across the cloud-native ecosystem. They explore why AI and agentic workloads are becoming a dominant theme in Kubernetes, why platform engineering teams are under more pressure than ever, and why the industry is still inventing best practices in real...

Heinrich Hartmann joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to share how Zalando runs their observability at an extraordinary scale. Heinrich explains why Zalando standardized on OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry across 3,500 microservices and 250 Kubernetes clusters, what it takes to process up to 60 million spans per second during Cyber Week, and how the team approaches sampling, cost control, and adaptive tele...

Buoyant CEO and creator of Linkerd William Morgan joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to explore what happens when you instrument traffic at the service mesh layer. Drawing on his experience at Twitter, William explains how Linkerd gives platform teams HTTP and gRPC-level visibility without touching application code, why retry budgets help prevent cascade failures, and how workload identity creates a st...

Jad Naous, founder and CEO of Grepr, joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to tackle one of observability’s biggest problems: too much data and not enough signal. Drawing on his experience at AppDynamics and Apache Druid, Jad explains why current architectures are fundamentally broken, and how Grepr compresses, aggregates and extracts signal directly in the stream, reducing data volume by up to 90% before...

Abby Bangser, founding principal engineer at Syntasso and co-author of “Platform as a Product,” joins Kasper Borg Nissen to unpack why most internal platforms struggle, and what it means to treat them like products. They explore producer vs. consumer dynamics, why golden paths often fail, how to measure platform success, and the shift toward internal “platform marketplaces” that scale beyond a sin...

Better Stack co-founder and CEO Juraj Masar joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to challenge the fundamentals of modern observability, from cloud lock-in and pricing models to how platforms should be built in the age of AI and how we market them. They discuss why observability costs are fundamentally broken, how Better Stack combines cloud and ‘bare metal,’ and why small teams can outperform large engin...

incident.io co-founder and CEO Stephen Whitworth joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to explain why paging someone is only the start of an incident, not a holistic solution. They break down how incident.io supports the full incident lifecycle (coordination, comms, timelines, and follow-ups), why incident response is a “multiplayer game” across engineers, support, and leadership, and how AI is starting t...

Mauricio Salatino, open source and ecosystem engineer at Diagrid and author of Platform Engineering on Kubernetes, joins guest host Kasper Borg Nissen to break down why Kubernetes is a foundation, not just a standalone platform. They discuss ecosystem-driven platform design, reducing developer cognitive load, bringing feedback from production back into the ‘inner loop’ of development, and how gene...

Checo, CEO and founder of Ottermon AI, joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to argue that modern observability is rife with noise, reactivity and human bottlenecks. Drawing on years of frontline SRE and product experience, Checo explains why most telemetry is wasted, how signal distillation and “fingerprinting” can surface real risk earlier, and why observability must shift from dashboards and alerts to...

Marylia Gutierrez, principal software engineer at Grafana Labs and an OpenTelemetry maintainer, joins Code RED guest host Kasper Borg Nissen, Dash0’s principal developer relations engineer, for a deep dive into how OpenTelemetry really works. They unpack how contributors get started, SIGs, why non-code contributions like documentation, localization, and governance matter just as much as PRs, and w...

NOFire AI founder and CEO Spiros Economakis joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to discuss why traditional observability and post-incident RCA are no longer enough in an AI-accelerated engineering world. Drawing from real production failures and years of SRE leadership, Spiros explains how causal AI and agentic workflows can predict failures before code ever reaches production. The conversation also exp...

Groundcover CEO Shahar Azulay joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic for a candid conversation on why modern observability needs a fundamental reset. They dive into the real-world challenges of eBPF-based instrumentation, migration friction from legacy vendors and bold go-to-market strategies. They also debate Groundcover’s “Bring Your Own Cloud” model and how it prompts a reassessment of cost, control and...

Traversal CEO and co-founder Anish Agarwal joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to unpack why AI-powered SRE agents are emerging as the next big shift in incident response. A former MIT researcher and now Columbia professor, Anish explains how causal machine learning and reinforcement learning shaped Traversal’s approach to finding root causes in complex systems. The conversation explores alert fatigue,...

Upriver co-founder and CEO Ido Bronstein joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic for a deep dive into the hidden risks of bad data and why “shift-left” observability is becoming essential. Ido shares why catching data issues at the source is critical for reliable pipelines, how Upriver helps engineers take ownership of data quality, and why AI adoption is making data accountability non-negotiable.

We’re taking the Code RED podcast public! Join Dash0 CEO Mirko Novakovic, CTO Ben Blackmore, and Principal AI Engineer Lariel Fernandes for a no-fluff look at AI in observability. We’ll dig into: ⃗⃗⃗→ What agentic observability might actually look like → How OpenTelemetry enables the AI ecosystem → How AI shows up in real engineering workflows → And what still needs to be built

Former Coralogix VP of Products and OverOps co-founder Chen Harel joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic for a candid look at the observability industry — past, present and future. They unpack the early days of production debugging, the realities of scaling in a crowded market and the behind-the-scenes of big-name acquisitions. From surviving startup cycles to navigating enterprise politics, Chen shares wh...

Former OpsGenie founder-turned-investor and Actioner CEO Berkay Mollamustafaoglu joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to reflect on his journey from building a bootstrapped alerting platform in Turkey to a $295M Atlassian exit — and why he’s now betting on customer intelligence as the next frontier. Berkay also shares hard-won advice for global founders navigating building, funding, go-to-market and exit...

Spacelift co-founder Marcin Wyszynski joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to talk about the past, present, and future of Infrastructure as Code. They unpack the birth of OpenTofu and why standardizing observability – especially with OpenTelemetry – is critical for managing increasingly complex infrastructure. Marcin also explains Spacelift’s mission to build infrastructure tooling that plays well in tod...

Industry veteran Andrew Mallaband of Breakthrough Moments joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to explore critical gaps in modern observability. Drawing on his "Observability 2025" series, Andrew breaks down why cost, data overload and poor strategy are holding teams back. They discuss the rise of AI-powered SRE agents, the challenge of missing telemetry, and how aligning data collection with i...

Quesma CEO Jacek Migdal joins Mirko Novakovic to explore the future of querying and database interoperability. They dive into how Quesma rewrites SQL on the fly for cross-system compatibility, and they tackle the lack of query language standards in observability. Jacek also shares his thoughts on AI-assisted querying and why decoupling applications from databases is key to long-term flexibility.

Edge Delta founder and CEO Ozan Unlu joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to discuss the rise of telemetry pipelines and why this once-niche idea is now critical infrastructure. Ozan shares how his experience at Microsoft and Sumo Logic inspired him to challenge centralized observability models. They cover data tiering, pipeline-based architectures and the growing role of AI in curating massive telemetry...

Juraci Paixão Kröhling, OpenTelemetry governing board member, joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic for a deep dive into the evolution of observability. From the JBoss and Jaeger early days to his new startup OllyGarden, Juraci shares how OpenTelemetry is reshaping the way we monitor distributed systems. They explore the challenges of tracing adoption, the semantics around spans and transactions, and why...

Langfuse CEO Marc Klingen joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to explore the evolving challenges of building and scaling LLM-powered applications. They unpack how Langfuse went from a YC pivot to becoming an open-source platform used by thousands of teams. The conversation dives deep into LLM-specific tracing, evaluation, and cross-functional debugging, highlighting how Langfuse is redefining the develo...

Lumigo CEO Erez Berkner joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to discuss the evolution of cloud observability and the critical role of AI in debugging modern architectures. They dive into the challenges of tracing serverless and hybrid environments, why traditional observability tools weren’t built for developers, and how AI-driven insights are shaping the future of automated troubleshooting.

ilert CEO Birol Yildiz joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to break down how ilert helps enterprises manage incidents more effectively. They explore why AI is a ‘must’ for some aspects of incident response, the role of technical redundancies in ensuring reliability, and what defines a strong MTTA and MTTR in the enterprise world.