writing
What we measured.
Notes from building this: what the agent costs per request, what it refuses to collect and why, and what the numbers looked like when a deploy went wrong. Every post has something in it we had to run something to find out.
A quadratic loop hid in our observability agent
The PHP agent cost 168µs per request at two thousand pending windows and 12µs at ten. Nothing was slow in testing, because the cost only appears under the traffic it was built to measure.
· 4 min read
What our agent refuses to collect, and what that costs
No MySQL query plans, no Mongo explain, no bind parameters, no backtrace arguments — four refusals that each cost a real signal, and the reasoning that made them the same decision.
· 3 min read
There is a feed. For what the product is rather than how it was built, start here.