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Meet the Author

Fred Hebert

Fred Hebert

Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Honeycomb.io

Fred is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) who has worked as a software engineer for over a decade and ended up with a healthy dislike of computers and clumsy automation. He’s a published technical author who loves distributed systems, systems engineering, and has a strong interest in resilience engineering and human factors.

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blog_brittleness_of_dashboards_featured_image
March 8, 2022

On the Brittleness of Dashboards

Dashboards are one of the most basic and popular tools software engineers use to operate their systems. In this post, I’ll make the argument that their use is unfortunately too widespread, and that the…

Software Engineering
what is an sre?
February 15, 2022

How We Define SRE Work

At the time of writing this post, I have officially been at Honeycomb for one year as a site reliability engineer (SRE). I had shared my initial experiences and impressions in this post and…

Software Engineering
blog_Do_You_Remember_20_Fires-THUMB
November 10, 2021

Incident Resolution: Do You Remember, the Twenty Fires of September?

From September to early October, Honeycomb declared five public incidents. Internally, the whole month was part of a broader operational burden, where over 20 different issues interrupted normal work. A fraction of them had…

Debugging
Software Engineering
data_availability_full_image
June 17, 2021

Data Availability Isn’t Observability

But it’s better than nothing… Most of the industry is racing to adopt better observability practices, and they’re discovering lots of power in being able to see and measure what their systems are doing….

Databases
Dogfooding
Service Level Objectives
image8.1 kafka migration
April 8, 2021

Lessons Learned From the Migration to Confluent Kafka

Over the last few months, Honeycomb’s platform team migrated to a new iteration of our ingest pipeline for customer events. Our migration to this newer architecture did not go too smoothly, as can be…

Software Engineering
bill-oxford–fGqsewtsJY-unsplash
February 9, 2021

On Not Being a Cog in the Machine

This is my first week here as the first dedicated SRE for Honeycomb, and in a welcoming gesture, I was asked if I wanted to write a blog post about my first impressions and…

Featured
Observability
Teams & Collaboration