Alistair Evans

Some lovely UDP performance improvements in .NET 8, to add to my series. Cover image says it all really. @scalablecory, @davidfowl enclave.io/high-performan…

Today, we're introducing eBPF-based OpenTelemetry tracing alongside a remotely controlled Better Stack Collector. eBPF is ready for prime time. Here's the playbook for adopting it. What's eBPF? "extended Berkeley Packet Filter" is a Linux kernel technology that lets you run sandboxed programs inside the kernel safely and efficiently. Thanks to eBPF, you can now instrument your clusters with OpenTelemetry without changing any application code 🤯 The eBPF ecosystem has matured significantly over the past few months and many Better Stack customers are already using it in production. Until now, deploying eBPF to production has been tricky. We're simplifying it today by bundling the best of the open source eBPF sensors into a single remotely controlled Better Stack collector you can deploy with a single command. Better Stack collector gives you granular control over what exactly gets instrumented. Get the service map of your cluster, RED metrics for individual services, see network flows, and aggregate your application and system logs out of the box. Without changing any code. Observability tools are only useful if you actually ingest all relevant data. Today, we're making that simpler and more convenient than ever. The eBPF OpenTelemetry playbook™ = "Do the easy thing before doing the hard thing" 1. In your staging environment. 2. Deploy the eBPF collector into your distributed cluster. 3. In 98% of cases: Declare victory, your app is now instrumented. 4. In 2% of cases: You notice a particular service has slowed down. For example, the CPU utilization on a high-throughput Redis instance handling millions of operations per second got noticeably higher. Better be safe, so you disable eBPF for this single instance while keeping it enabled for the other 98% of services. 5. If needed, use the OpenTelemetry SDK auto-instrumentation to instrument the last 2% of applications. Most teams today still start with step 5. If you're revisiting your observability stack, I encourage you to give eBPF a chance: it has matured significantly and is better than you might expect. Better Stack encourages combining OpenTelemetry traces from the OTel SDK, eBPF, and your frontend. That's the only way to get the clearest picture of what's actually happening in your application. Want to chat eBPF? Catch me at KubeCon in Amsterdam next week!

What do you do when you’re in Amsterdam? You get on a boat! March 24, 8:30 PM. We’re hosting a private canal cruise for the cloud native crowd. Cold beers. Dutch snacks. Zero agenda. Join the Better Stack crew for a night on the water! Link to RSVP below ↓

Don’t visit our booth. Unless, of course, your observability bill is starting to cost more than your infrastructure. Sound familiar? Let us show you a better way at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2026. Stop by booth 892 to meet the team, see the platform in action, and experience our AI SRE firsthand.

I'm proud for @BetterStackHQ to sponsor @vuejs 🔥 @youyuxi, the creator of Vue.js, is also the guest of the latest episode of the Better Stack podcast. Give it a listen, it's a great one! Link in a thread

@jurajmasar @BetterStackHQ She's beautiful. 🤩

This wasn't on my bingo card: @BetterStackHQ ▶️ button

@jurajmasar @BetterStackHQ It's honestly still wild to point AI SRE at an incident and say "what caused this", I look away, and I come back to an answer. 🔥 Great to spend more time building, less time reviewing logs and dashboards. (there's a great demo from @JollyShopland : betterstack.com/demos/ai-sre/)

AI SRE is no longer just a cool demo. It's real, it works, and can debug real issues. Today. How do I know? @BetterStackHQ customers keep telling me 😂 AI SRE is one of those rare features that our customers are *truly* excited about. My favorite use case? Letting the wider company use the MCP server to debug issues on behalf of customers, eliminating many "L2" technical support requests for engineers. And 2026 has just begun 🤯

@jurajmasar @BetterStackHQ @RichOBray @JollyShopland Made it full circle back to engineering at a media company. 😂

"You're with Better Stack, the YouTube channel?" "Yes! Sort of." I knew our YouTube channel was a success when I had to start explaining to people that @BetterStackHQ is more than just a media company. Today, we crossed 100k subscribers 🎉 Amazing job @RichOBray @JollyShopland @AGauracs72140 @The_JoshWenner 👏👏👏 LET'S GOOO 💪

@curusarn @BetterStackHQ Metrics for everything! 🥳

I saw this and immediately wanted a dashboard. So I built one at @BetterStackHQ. Get a Cloudflare dashboard in 3 minutes. Workers, requests, errors, cached ratio, bots. Deploy the worker, send metrics to Better Stack. Done. Quick setup steps ↓

@jurajmasar @BetterStackHQ Love it!

Query your logs & metrics with PQL, the Pipelined Query Language, now in @BetterStackHQ Inspired by Kusto's KQL and Splunk's SPL, Better Stack now supports the open source PQL equivalent. Implemented in a day 🤯 Thank you pql.dev! 🙏 What should we ship next?

@davidfowl Very much so. Sub-agents are your friend; my 2 cents are treat your main code session like the main thread, keep it brief.

Claude code compacting in the middle of a thought, is absolutely a mojo killer.

@GeoffreyHuntley @AnthropicAI I'm absolutely not an AI minmaxer, but Opus 4.5 for me is basically; research subagent, plan and refine in main, then spin out sub-agents as much as possible to avoid burning context and the compaction, it feels like 4.5 forgets key goals less when the original is more "recent".

@evocationist @AnthropicAI sonnet 3.5 was my oh fuck; it was dumb and powerful. you had to watch it like a hawk. opus 4.5 is me expressing ideas and giving it helpful post inferencing hooks of “yo did you use i18n?” that’s perhaps 4.5s downside it’s forgetful

When you talk about "AI's inability to code", this seems to me to reveal a total disconnect from reality and this is why I'm urging you to ACTUALLY TRY IT, find out for yourself, and join the rest of us on this Earth.

@GeoffreyHuntley @AnthropicAI I know how to create performant code, and how to spec it; opus can execute. Example, rust-based cloudflare worker, knew what I wanted to build, and how I wanted to optimise it, but I don't need to be a rust expert anymore.

@GeoffreyHuntley I've been trying coding with various models since opus 3 I think, and it was a bit tough to start, but @AnthropicAI opus 4.5 is kinda wild. It's kinda like an accelerant for ideas, language agnostic.

See how to create Retrieval-Augmented Generation apps with Better Stack.

React is great... Until it's full page, re-renders start to impact your site's performance. Luckily, React Scan by @aidenybai is here to help automatically spot these issues and make your site faster 🚀 Here's our latest video going through exactly how it works.

GitHub supports over 200 programming languages and has over 330 million repositories. But it has a big problem. It stores almost 19 petabytes of data which is lot. And much of that data is unreachable; it's just taking up space unnecessarily. But with some clever engineering, the team were able reduce the size of specific projects by more than 90%. How? We've written a 5-minute article with all the details. buff.ly/40QcqRc

@bruno_hiis @BetterStackHQ Bruno, I screwed up — and I want to apologize. Going forward, we’ll be adjusting the price for 1 billion of retained metrics data points from $1,000 to $5. That’s 200x cheaper. The backstory: betterstack.com/community/blog…

Such a fantastic show, finally a true successor to Jonathan Creek! Who do I have to pay to make sure there's a season 2!!?

- New this week 📣: Send metrics easily with Prometheus scrape 👉 1. Send metrics easily with Prometheus scrape Today, we're introducing Prometheus scrape. This is superior to the currently available push method. Using this method, you allow the Better Stack user-agent access to your Prometheus exporters, and we scrape them for you automatically. There is no need to install Vector and manage the forwarding to us. 👉 2. Filter logs using regular expressions Looking to do more advanced log searches in Live tail? Now you can start using regex in full-text searches like /OK in \d+\.\d+ms/ as well as attribute search queries like message:/Started (GET|POST)/.

@shanselman I had issues connecting to Disney Plus a while back, and their support told me to turn off IPv6 support on my TV, which worked. 🤣

Weirdest home network thing. I have dual internet (Ziply primary, Comcast backup) because my job requires ‘net. Has worked for YEARS without issue. Last two weeks, I can’t watch Hulu or Disney place with Ziply. Reddit has similar errors going back YEARS. Any Hulu engineers here?