Blog

Meet the Author

Ben Hartshorne

Principal Software Engineer

Ben has spent much of his career setting up monitoring systems for startups and now is thrilled to help the industry see a better way. He is always eager to find the right graph to understand a service and will look for every excuse to include a whiteboard in the discussion.

June 28, 2022

Exploring AWS Costs Beyond the Service Level

This post will talk about using a derived column to directly connect individual customer experiences to the cost of providing that service with AWS Lambda. By leveraging these tools, we can better understand when our product is used in costly ways.

Service Level Objectives

Software Engineering

July 29, 2021

Tale of the Beagle (Or It Doesn’t Scale—Except When It Does)

If there’s one thing folks working in internet services love saying, it’s: Yeah, sure, but that won’t scale. It’s an easy complaint to make, but in this post, we’ll walk through building a service…

Dogfooding

May 16, 2019

Stop Your Database From Hating You With This One Weird Trick

Let’s not bury the lede here: we use observability-driven development at Honeycomb to identify and prevent DB load issues.

Power to the People: Control Your Own Trigger Destiny with Webhooks

When we release something new, whether it’s a new SDK or Beeline or a new feature in the UI, we’ll often set a Honeycomb Trigger to keep track of its use. Sometimes we don’t…

Dogfooding

Product Updates

September 11, 2018

Level Up with Derived Columns: Two Neat Tricks That Will Improve Your Observability

When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t realize just how many different ways folks could use them.

How Are Structured Logs Different From Events?

We’re all collectively trying to define observability (“o11y,” pronounced “olly”) these days, and, as Honeycomb is sometimes described as an event-based observability product, trying to define all the other words that go around o11y…

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 6: Instrumenting a Production Service

This post continues our dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 5: The Correlations Are Not What They Seem. In a recent blog post, I talked about what sorts of things should go…

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 4: Check Before You Change

This post continues our dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 3: End-to-end Failures. As Honeycomb matures, we try to roll out changes as smoothly as possible to minimize surprise on the part…

Enriching Nginx Logs with request_time, Server Data, and Other Goodies

How can you make your nginx logs more awesome? Nginx has some fantastic data hiding in its log_format spec, but oddly enough, most of it is not enabled by default.

Connectors & Integrations

Product Updates

August 18, 2016

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 2: Migrating API Versions

Continued from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 1: The Long Tail. We recently released a new version of our API. As scarred veterans of building and supporting APIs, we made sure to retain backwards…

Connectors & Integrations

Debugging

Dogfooding

Operations