Never Let AI Touch Prod Alone | Incidentally Reliable S3 E2

Most systems only tell you what already broke, they are reactive by design. In this episode, our guest Zac Nickens, founder of Resonance Systems, joins host Jim Hirschauer to unpack the difference between visibility and true observability, how Resonance's Horizon product predicts service interruptions before they happen, and why AI agents need a simulated blast radius check before they ever touch production. It is a deep dive into proactive reliability, explainable AI, and what it takes to trust a system you cannot fully see.🎙️ Incidentally Reliable is brought to you by Xurrent. 🔗 Learn more: https://www.xurrent.com/incident-management-responseGuest: Zac Nickens, Founder of Resonance Systems 🔗 https://resonancesystems.ai/ 🔗 https://www.typedworld.ai/ 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/zac-nickens-2aa96a79/#IncidentallyReliable #sre #devops #ai #observability #incidentmanagement #Xurrent #podcast #explainableai

Host Jim Hirschauer sits down with our guest Steve Flanders, Senior Director of Engineering at Splunk and a founding member of OpenTelemetry, to talk through the real cost of high cardinality data, why the OpenTelemetry Collector works best as a control plane and not just a forwarder, and why SLO based alerts beat threshold based ones every time. They also get into the level of effort it actually takes to tame observability data and how to stop paging for things that do not matter.🎙️ Incidentally Reliable is brought to you by Xurrent. 🔗 Learn more: https://www.xurrent.com/incident-management-responseGuest: Steve Flanders, Senior Director of Engineering at Splunk 🔗 https://sflanders.net/ 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveflanders/#IncidentallyReliable #SRE #DevOps #Observability #OpenTelemetry #IncidentManagement #Xurrent #Podcast #PlatformEngineering

Host Jim Hirschauer sits down with our guest Zahan Parekh, founder of Gimic, to talk runbooks, why they go stale, and why AI still needs a human in the loop before it touches production. They also get into governance, access control, and audit trails, the guardrails regulated industries rely on before letting AI near prod.🎙️ Incidentally Reliable is brought to you by Xurrent. 🔗 Learn more: https://www.xurrent.com/incident-management-responseGuest: Zahan Parekh, Founder of Gimic 🔗 https://gimic-tech.com/ 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/zahan-parekh-1a5bb21b0/#IncidentallyReliable #SRE #DevOps #AIAutomation #IncidentManagement #Xurrent #Podcast #ProductionEngineering #platformengineering

We are back for Season 3 of the Incidentally Reliable podcast! 🎙️In this season premiere, we are kicking off a new chapter as part of Xurrent. Our new host, Jim Hirschauer, sits down with podcast veteran and Zenduty co-founder, Vishwa, for a special throwback episode.They take a trip down memory lane to uncover the real story behind Zenduty, why it was built, how this podcast started, and the massive "needle in the haystack" observability problem that still plagues SRE teams today.💡 In this episode, we cover:-The transition from Zenduty to Xurrent: What’s changing?-Why observability tools often create more noise, not less.-The "Culture vs. Tooling" debate: Why you can't buy reliability.Jim’s vision for Season 3.----------------------------------------------------------------------🔗 Connect with us:Website: https://www.xurrent.com/podcastLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xurrent/#SRE #SiteReliabilityEngineering #Podcast #Zenduty #Xurrent #DevOps #IncidentManagement #TechPodcast #SeasonPremiere

In this episode, Sudarshan shares his experience leading high-performing SRE and infrastructure teams at Rippling, Twilio, Walmart, and Epsilon. He talks about reducing CI/CD costs by 60 percent, cutting on-call alerts by 65 percent, and the mindset required to build resilient systems.

In this episode, Madhu Rawat (CTO, Xurrent) sits down with Sakshi — Co-founder and Head of Engineering at Kapstan, with leadership experience at Sumo Logic and UpGrad. They discuss the evolution of observability, building for scale, the role of AI in incident management, and what it means to lead engineering teams through change.

In this episode, Phil (CPO) and Madhu (CTO) from Xurrent sit down with Vishwa and Ankur from Zenduty to talk about ITxM, building for reliability across teams, and how product and platform thinking come together in real-world incident workflows.

In this episode, we speak with Deepak Rajanna, CPTO at SatSure and ex-Amazon, Flipkart, xto10x, about pricing failures at scale, war room lessons from Big Billion Days, and building satellite-powered systems with SRE principles at their core.

In this episode of Incidentally Reliable, we sit down with Amit Rhinde, Head of Engineering at GoDaddy, to uncover the secrets behind building resilient systems, scaling global operations, and ensuring uptime for millions of users.Amit takes us through his incredible journey, from pioneering SRE practices at Adobe and AWS to leading one of the world's most trusted hosting platforms.

In this episode of Incidentally Reliable, we chat with Denys Pashutynski, Senior Engineering Manager of Site Reliability at Roblox, about the challenges of maintaining gaming reliability for millions. Denys, with experience at companies like Twitter, AWS, and eBay, dives into how Roblox handles latency, traffic spikes, and customer expectations.