On day 3 of the hackathon, I compared Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 using the gcx tool and debug-with-grafana skill to diagnose a fault-injected failure in the OpenTelemetry demo. Both models pinpoint the root cause correctly, while Sonnet proves cheaper for straightforward issues. And an reflections after 3 days, on how skill files and the right context make AI-driven observability much more effective.

Day 2 of the hackathon. I used the Grafana gcx debug-with-grafana skill with Claude to find the root cause of failing and slow services from metrics, logs and traces, and monitoring Claude’s own token usage and cost with OpenTelemetry. And the team outing with Quad driving and paintball.

Day 1 of the OpenValue hackathon in Belgium. I explored AI tooling and got hands-on with gcx, Grafana’s Observability as Code CLI tool.

An Application Observability Code Challenge with virtual threads. Spot the difference between system thread and virtual thread usage for the same application with some problems.

The third and final day of the hackathon. During this hackathon I learned a lot about Quarkus, LangChain4j, Grafana MCP and many other things. Read this blog to read the progress of the last day and my conclusions of the hackathon.

The second day of the hackathon was a mix of activities. Next to the hackathon, we had a climbing outdoor activity. In this blog post I will share the results of the hackathon on day 2 and some pictures of the climbing activity.