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Jessica Kerr
I think my biggest question is: How do I introduce observability without manually weaving tracing-related code throughout my codebase since that adds a lot of noise? TL;DR: Use auto-instrumentation from OpenTelemetry. Traces will happen….
Mike Goldsmith
In the past, we’ve written about what instrumentation is and the insights it provides. Instrumenting your code generates telemetry that shows you how your system is performing, and whether your system is healthy. Like…
Charity Majors
How do we bring observability to the DB world? In the SQL Server world, you can marry up perfmon and extended event traces but is that enough? What about the other DBs? Oh goody,…
Harrison Calato
What are the foundational elements of a high-performance engineering team? While there’s no silver bullet, a few common threads make up the fabric of engineering teams that set the standard for velocity, quality, and…
Pete Hodgson
It’s harder to understand and operate production systems in 2021 than it was in 2001. Why is that? Shouldn’t we have gotten better at this in the past two decades? There are valid reasons…
We here at Honeycomb have some pretty strong opinions on the interviewing and hiring process: Namely, that it is broken af in our industry, for engineering and non-engineering roles alike. Too often, it seeks…
Hey Miss O11y, what’s your favorite thing about Christmas? Ooh, good question! My favorite thing about this part of the year is that work slows down, everybody is on vacation, and those of us…
Danyel Fisher
At Honeycomb Developer Week, I got an opportunity to walk through a couple of fun new features we’ve shipped since August and ways that we’ve been able to improve Honeycomb for you. Hearing feedback…
Observability is a great way to understand how your system is operating in production, diagnose errors when systems fail, and find subtle gaps in logic. But there’s no reason to wait until your code…
Evelyn Chea
Getting started with observability can be time consuming. It takes time to configure your apps and practice to change the way you approach troubleshooting. So it can be hard to prioritize investing time, especially…
Steve Lewis
On November 18, between 00:50 and 00:56 UTC, an update was deployed that improved Honeycomb’s business intelligence (BI) telemetry available from our production operations environment. Contained within that update was a defect that escaped…
Alayshia Knighten
Have you ever deep dived into the sea of your tracing data, but wanted additional context around your underlying system? For instance, it may be easy to see when/where certain users are experiencing latency,…
Liz Fong-Jones
Dear Miss O11y, My developers and I can’t agree about what the right approach is for running load tests in production. Should we even be running load tests against our production infrastructure or is…
Today, I found a concurrency bug before I noticed it. Like, it was subtle, and so I wasn’t quite sure I saw it—maybe I hadn’t hit refresh yet? Later, I looked at the trace…
I have a good sense of how to use traces to understand my system’s behavior within request/response cycles. What about multi-request processes? What about async tasks spawned within a request? Is there a higher-level…
Is the lack of time holding you back from sharpening your observability (o11y) skills? Maybe you’ve dipped your toes into o11y, but you’re not sure how and where it will drastically improve your team’s…
When you send telemetry into Honeycomb, our infrastructure needs to buffer your data before processing it in our “retriever” columnar storage database. For the entirety of Honeycomb’s existence, we have used Apache Kafka to…
Dear Miss O11y: It feels so overwhelming to get started with observability. I want to use Honeycomb, but it feels like I can’t justify spending the time and money without having proof of how…
“Can a subject matter expert ever step down?” Have you written anything about how to solve the ‘nobody wants to be on-call as a subject matter expert to support people handling incidents’ problem? My best idea…
Fred Hebert
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…
