Google SRE Prodcast The One With Steph Hippo and Observability
Dec 16, 2025
Steph Hippo, Platform Engineering Director at Honeycomb, shares her expertise in AI-driven observability during a fascinating conversation. She explains how observability is key for understanding complex systems, creating a symbiotic relationship with AI. The discussion highlights how AI can enhance incident response, lead to self-healing systems, and significantly improve junior SRE onboarding. Steph encourages small teams to learn from others' mistakes and emphasizes the importance of structured growth conversations and experimentation.
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Observability As The Foundation
- Observability is understanding complex systems from their outputs and instrumentation.
- It forms the foundation SREs use to detect problems and deliver better user experience.
AI Introduces New Uncertainty
- Running AI is itself complex and introduces probabilistic uncertainty into systems.
- This increases the need for refined observability to understand AI's system effects.
AI And Observability Reinforce Each Other
- AI and observability form a self-reinforcing loop where each improves the other.
- Observability gives context that makes AI useful and AI helps navigate observability faster.