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.
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....
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...
Incident Review: You Can't Deploy Binaries That Don't Exist
Between 22:50 and 22:54 UTC on July 9, our capacity to accept traffic to api.honeycomb.io gradually diminished until all incoming requests started to fail. 8...
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. Like every online service, we experience...
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...
The Honeycomb Beeline for Go v2 is...Go!
We've seen folks do amazing things using our Honeycomb Beelines--getting their apps instrumented in next-to-no time, expanding their observability, growing their understanding of what is...
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 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...
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,...
Event Foo: What Should I Add to an Event?
When we’re talking with people about how they should start using Honeycomb, many ask for guidance about what should go into an event. Though there...
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...
Honeycomb Triggers - Alert on your Data
We’re happy to announce the launch of Honeycomb Triggers—a method to get notifications when the data you send in to Honeycomb crosses configured thresholds. We’d...
The MySQL Slow Query Log, AWS Golang SDK, RDS and You
Did you know you can do fun things with the MySQL slow query log, using the nothing but the AWS golang SDK for RDS? It’s...
MySQL and Honeycomb: My First 10 Minutes
As part of the process of building our RDS connector for Honeycomb, we ran it on our own database logs. A few neat things came...
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...