Observability

March 26, 2020

Challenges with Implementing SLOs

A few months ago, Honeycomb released our SLO — Service Level Objective — feature to the world. We’ve written before about how to use it and some of the use scenarios. Today, I’d like…

March 23, 2020

OpenTelemetry: New Honeycomb Exporters

We’re really big fans of OpenTelemetry at Honeycomb. As we’ve blogged about before, OpenTelemetry is the next phase of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. Instead of working on separate but similar efforts, those two…

Debugging

Observability

March 17, 2020

Christine Yen

Chad Malchow, VP Sales Joins Honeycomb

Welcome to the Hive & Observability Community. Though it may ultimately be remembered for a multitude of other things, for us at Honeycomb, 2019 was the Year of Observability. Observability grew from a misunderstood…

Observability

March 10, 2020

Charity Majors

The Future of Software is a Sociotechnical Problem

“Sociotechnical” I learned this word from Liz Fong-Jones recently, and it immediately entered my daily lexicon. You know exactly what it means as soon as you hear it, and then you wonder how you…

March 6, 2020

Honeycomb Welcomes New VP Engineering

(Why it’s so important to look inside your org before you look outside) I am delighted to announce that we have a new VP of engineering: our own Emily Nakashima, formerly director of engineering…

Observability

February 27, 2020

Danyel Fisher

They Aren’t Pillars, They’re Lenses

To have Observability is to have the ability to understand your system’s internal state based on signals and externally-visible output. Honeycomb’s approach to Observability is to strive toward this: every feature of the product…

Debugging

Observability

February 13, 2020

Deirdre Mahon

Bring Test Engineering into your DevOps practice

What do a test engineer and a DevOps or SRE team member have in common? The reality is that different teams need to proactively understand what is happening in production at critical milestones along…

February 5, 2020

“Hot-take” on 3 Popular Open Source Tools & The Observability Landscape

New eGuide takes a closer look at Prometheus, ELK and Jaeger: Open source tooling has its benefits. No licensing costs and you’re free to download, get started and modify over time. If something goes…

January 22, 2020

Alyson van Hardenberg

Using Honeycomb to remember to delete a feature flag

Feature flags are great and serve us in so many ways. However, we do not love long-lived feature flags. They lead to more complicated code, and when we inevitably default them to be true…

December 17, 2019

How To Make Your Customers Happy, with Eaze

“Success is a catastrophe that you have to survive.” — CJ Silverio A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of hosting CJ Silverio, Principal Engineer, and Ben Gardella, Manger of Infrastructure…

September 24, 2019

So You Want To Build An Observability Tool…

I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: observability is not a synonym for monitoring, and there are no three pillars. The pillars are bullshit. Briefly: monitoring is how you manage your known-unknowns,…

Observability

September 12, 2019

Rachel Perkins

The Path from Unstructured Logs to Observability

Are you starting out on your journey toward observability? Do you have a mandate from management, or are you a lone warrior in the matrix? From your starting point, how will you make the…

September 5, 2019

Notes from Observability Roundtables: Capabilities Deep-dive

Greetings, fellow o11ynaut! You may recall a post we shared here about two months ago that told tales of the themes we felt best represented our recent release of the Framework for an Observability…

Observability

July 18, 2019

Rachel Perkins

Notes from Observability Roundtables

The Velocity conference happened recently, and as part of it we (Honeycomb) hosted a sort of reverse-panel discussion, where you talked, and we listened. You may be aware that we’re in the process of…

Observability

July 9, 2019

Rachel Perkins

Building Your Observability Practice with Tools that Co-exist

A lot of product marketing is about telling people to throw away what they have in favor of something entirely new. Sometimes that is the right answer–sometimes what you have has completely outlived its…

Metrics

Observability

July 2, 2019

Deirdre Mahon

Velocity (& Reliability) – Two must-haves for every software engineering team

(Field notes from O’Reilly’s Velocity 2019 Show, San Jose.) It was steamy hot in San Jose during O’Reilly’s Velocity show and the normally frigid AC temps in the expo hall were welcomed by all…

Observability

Software Engineering

June 25, 2019

Christine Yen

Reflections on Monitorama 2019

This year was my third in a row attending (and now speaking at!) Monitorama. Because the organizers do a great job of turning introverts into extroverts for three days straight, it’s always a fun…

Monitoring

Observability

June 11, 2019

Rachel Perkins

Toward a Maturity Model for Observability

Access to observability is becoming critical to organizations shipping software, running modern infrastructures in production, and to understanding how users are experiencing their service. To achieve success in delivering a complex service, it’s no…

April 11, 2019

Tracing and Observability for Background Jobs

Illuminating the under-loved with Honeycomb Most modern web apps end up sprouting some subset of tasks that happen in the “background”, i.e., when a user is not directly waiting on the request from a…

December 20, 2018

Metric Analysis, Application Performance Monitoring, and Log Management: Where Does Honeycomb Fit In?

If you’re involved in improving the performance of your application, you’ve probably heard about application performance monitoring (APM), metric analysis, and log management. But you might not understand what they are or the differences…