Software Engineering Archives

November 16, 2018

The Core Analysis Loop, or: Heatmaps Make Analysis Better

In this blog miniseries, I’m talking about how to think about doing data analysis, the Honeycomb way. In Part I, I talked about how heatmaps help us understand how data analysis works. In Part…

November 9, 2018

Heatmaps Make Ops Better

In this blog miniseries, I’d like to talk about how to think about doing data analysis “the Honeycomb way.” Welcome to part 1, where I cover what a heatmap is—and how using them can…

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. We…

July 24, 2018

Level Up With Derived Columns: Bucketing Events For Comparison

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…

July 5, 2018

Level Up With Derived Columns: Understanding Screen Size (With Basic Arithmetic)

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. We…

March 22, 2018

Observability: A Manifesto

Everybody and their freaking grandpa is now claiming to do observability, not stodgy old monitoring. Fine, great. Nice to be trendy I guess. But are they? What’s the difference? You all know how I…

Observability

Software Engineering

March 15, 2018

Travis Redman

Resolving High CPU Usage in Kubernetes With Honeycomb

At Honeycomb, we’re excited about Kubernetes. In fact, we’re in the early stages of moving some of our services to k8s. Tools like kops have made getting started with k8s easier than ever. But…

March 8, 2018

The New Best Engineer

If you make a habit of reading twitter or the writings of various thought lords and ladies of the internet, you’ve probably heard a lot of advice on what software engineers should do, like:…

Observability

Software Engineering

How many events and datasets have nested JSON?

May 23, 2017

Ben Hartshorne

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…

October 6, 2016

Part 4/5: Everyone is a DBA

DBAs may be the last remaining priesthood in our industry. But software engineers and operations engineers are increasingly finding themselves responsible for precious company data, and DBAs are increasingly adopting generalist skillsets and best…

October 5, 2016

Part 2/5: Dear Software Engineers

Observability is not a thing for operations or some other team to care about. Software engineers, you are increasingly the primary owners of your own services … and this is a great thing. Developers,…

Observability

Software Engineering