Sazabi: AI-Native Observability for Fast-Moving Teams (with Sherwood Callaway)

In this episode, Shane and Abhi sit down with Sherwood Callaway, founder of Sazabi, an AI-native observability platform designed for engineering teams that move fast. Sherwood shares his journey from building infrastructure and observability teams at Brex to realizing that modern development tools are moving at light speed, while observability tooling hasn't kept pace. While AI agents can ship thousands of lines of code per day, teams are still debugging production with the same tools they've been using for years: Datadog, Sentry, manual dashboards, and manual incident triage. Sazabi takes a radically different approach to observability centered on three core principles: 1. Less is More — Debugging an incident is as simple as asking a question. "Why is production down?" The best UI for observability is chat. 2. Logs Are All You Need — The "three pillars of observability" (logs, metrics, traces) is outdated dogma. With AI, you can accomplish everything using just logs. Logs are events, metrics are aggregated events, and traces are collections of start/end events. Logs can do it all. 3. Monitoring as We Know It is Dead — Sazabi replaces static monitors with agentic anomaly detection. Think of it as a team of staff engineers constantly watching your app for issues, investigating problems, and only escalating what matters. In this conversation, we dive into the gap between modern development and modern observability, and why the idea that “logs are all you need” is both controversial and, in Sherwood's view, correct. We also explore how Sazabi uses AI agents for root cause analysis (RCA), the philosophy behind simplifying observability for all engineers, and the company’s current status.