Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Trace without traces

A customer emailed on a Tuesday: checkout hung for ten seconds. I opened our tracing tool, punched in the time window, and got nothing. The trace was sampled out. We keep 1% of traces, like most shops with real traffic do. The one request that actually mattered was in the 99% we threw away. I spent twenty minutes admiring our observability stack before admitting it couldn’t answer a first-grader’s question: what happened to this person? Here’s what I know now.

Would You Ask a Chef To Cut With a Bending Blade? | Longview Tax

Chef Laurent trained under Ducasse. Her knife work was flawless. Then the blade bent before it touched the meat. She was told the proper knives were being used elsewhere. These had worked "well enough" before. Well enough is a difficult standard to cook by. It's a worse one for filing taxes. Your tax team knows the feeling. Fragmented data. Manual reconciliation. Every close cycle a race against "well enough.".

Beyond REST: AI Agent Integration through Model Context Protocol

Your users increasingly work through AI assistants. When they ask an agent to check a case status, analyze last quarter's metrics, or kick off an approval workflow, that agent needs to access your enterprise systems. Enabling that connection is the core challenge of AI agent integration: giving AI assistants the ability to discover, understand, and safely interact with business applications and data on behalf of users.

AI Agent Platforms Are Getting Hacked. Here's What's Missing.

In late June 2026, two of the most widely used AI agent platforms were compromised within the same week. Langflow disclosed a critical unauthenticated remote code execution flaw. Dify, powering over one million applications, revealed four vulnerabilities that exposed private conversations and internal APIs across tenant boundaries. These weren't theoretical risks. They were production exploits hitting real infrastructure.

How to Switch LLM Providers Without Downtime

LLM provider switching went from a theoretical concern to an operational emergency in June 2026, when Anthropic disabled Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 following a US government directive . The shutdown was swift, with access suspended just days after the models launched. Enterprises that had built production workflows around those models lost access overnight. The event was a wake-up call, but the underlying risk had been building for years.

AI Gateway vs. Direct LLM API Integration: The Architecture Decision Defining Your AI Strategy

Enterprise AI adoption is accelerating. In PwC's April 2025 survey of 308 US business executives, 88% said they plan to increase AI-related budgets in the next 12 months . But scaling AI from pilot to production exposes a structural problem most teams discover too late: **direct LLM API integration** creates fragility at scale. The question is not whether your organization will consume multiple LLMs. It is how you will govern that consumption without building bespoke infrastructure for every provider.

Logi Symphony Surges Ahead of Tableau in New Info-Tech Report

The results of Info-Tech’s Head-to-Head: Business Intelligence & Analytics – Enterprise are in. In the report, Info-Tech and SoftwareReviews evaluated 360 verified enterprise end-user reviews to set benchmarks for vendor capabilities, product experience, and the full customer relationship. The study evaluates 11 areas amongst software vendors that are especially critical to making and fostering strong, long-term relationships between software providers and their customers. These include.

How Cross Joins Are Killing Your Dashboard Performance

Your analytics team built a report. It worked fine in development, but when it went into production, users began to complain about loading time. Your team has checked the database and looked at the dashboard configuration, but nobody can find the problem. There’s a good chance the cause is a cross join, and there’s an even better chance it’s executing in the wrong place.

AI Feels Out of Reach for SMB Finance Teams. Here's How to Change That.

You’ve heard the pitch: AI is going to revolutionize finance. It’s going to write your variance commentary, spot anomalies before you do, answer questions about your data in plain English, and free your team from the drudgery of month-end prep so you can focus on what actually matters: strategy, decisions, and moving the business forward. It’s easy to see why you’d believe the hype.