I've been in this industry long enough to know when someone is selling me snake oil. Right now, that someone is every single vendor with "AIOps" in their pitch deck. Last month my company paid for a demo of one of "intelligent observability platforms." The sales engineer spent forty five minutes showing me dashboards that looked like they were designed by someone who watched Minority Report once and decided that was the future. Lots of spinning globes. Glowing nodes. A chatbot that could "explain" incidents in natural language. I asked a simple question. "What's actually different here from the alerting rules we already have in Prometheus?" The answer was thirty seconds of silence followed by some hand waving about "probabilistic correlation engines." Here's what I think is actually happening under the hood. They ingest your logs and metrics. They run some basic correlation rules, the kind any junior SRE could write in an afternoon.…