#43 – Observability at the Proxy Level: How Linkerd Brings Visibility to Services, Identity, and ...

Buoyant CEO and creator of Linkerd William Morgan joins Dash0’s Mirko Novakovic to explore what happens when you instrument traffic at the service mesh layer. Drawing on his experience at Twitter, William explains how Linkerd gives platform teams HTTP and gRPC-level visibility without touching application code, why retry budgets help prevent cascade failures, and how workload identity creates a stronger foundation for security and observability. They also discuss MCP traffic, AI agents in production, and how observability needs to be re-optimized for LLMs.