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 Logs Are All You Need — The "three pillars of observability" (logs, metrics, traces) is outdated dogma.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. AI Agents Hour is a weekly livestream hosted by Mastra CPO Shane Thomas and CTO Abhi Aiyer. Airing Mondays at 12PM Pacific on YouTube and X, the show covers breaking AI news, agent development techniques, and features interviews with industry experts building AI applications today. 📚 MASTRA RESOURCES Mastra: https://mastra.ai Learn Mastra in the world's first MCP-Based Course: https://mastra.ai/course Principles of Building AI Agents (Book): https://mastra.ai/book Patterns for Building AI Agents (New Book): https://mastra.ai/blog/patterns-book https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSduJjc515f6RZJqtkR2ByqJZrB0iP8B7SUKnjjZE9IajH_I8w/viewform MASTRA? Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework designed for building and shipping AI-powered applications and agents with minimal friction. It supports the full lifecycle of agent development—from prototype to production. You can integrate it with frontend and backend stacks (e.g., React, Next.js, Node) or run agents as standalone services. If you’re a JavaScript or TypeScript developer looking to build an agentic or AI-powered product without starting from first principles, Mastra provides the scaffolding, tools, and integrations to accelerate that process. 🔗 RESOURCES Learn more about Sazabi at sazabi.com Follow Sazabi on X at @sazabi Follow Sherwood on X at @sh_callaway  CHAPTERS 00:00 – Intro 03:12 – Why Sazabi Needed to Exist 05:00 – The Gap: Modern Development vs. Old Observability Tools 06:25 – Logs Are All You Need 11:05 – How Sazabi Reconstructs Everything from Logs 12:53 – AI Agents for Root Cause Analysis & Agentic Anomaly Detection 14:51 – Sazabi for Fast-Growing Teams