Ask Miss O11y: Do I Need Observability If My Stack Is Boring?
Observability came out of microservices and cloud-native, right? If you have a simpler architecture, does o11y matter?” — this question came up during recent office...
Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Distro for Java reaches 1.0 release
Today, the Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Distribution for Java reaches a major milestone with a 1.0 release. This is the first Honeycomb OTel Distro to come out...
startSpan vs. startActiveSpan
TL;DR: startSpan is easier and measures a duration. Use it if your work won’t create any subspans. startActiveSpan requires that you pass a callback for...
Honeycomb Terraform Provider Now Officially Supported by Honeycomb
Previously announced as a community-led project, the Terraform provider for Honeycomb is now officially maintained by Honeycomb in partnership with Hashicorp. We recognize how valuable...
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...
Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry: Who’s There? The Resource.
I’m adding instrumentation code to my app. To set it up, I have to create a Resource. What does that mean? What can I do...
OpenTelemetry (OTel) Is Key to Avoiding Vendor Lock-in
The promise of OpenTelemetry is that it can help you avoid vendor lock-in by allowing you to instrument your applications once, then send that data...
Ask Miss O11y: OpenTelemetry in the Front End: Tracing Across Page Load
We want to measure the time that a user waits between pushing a button and seeing their result. The examples for creating a trace span...
The Truth About “MEH-TRICS”
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I said a lot of inflammatory things about metrics. “Metrics are shit salad.” “Metrics are...
Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry—Context
“What is up with the Context in OpenTelemetry? Why do I need to mess with it at all? Why, when I set a span as...
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...
ICYMI: Achieving Visibility in Your CI/CD Pipeline With Honeycomb + CircleCI
Before continuous integration came to be, setting up builds was no fun because the complexity and overhead involved in a release cycle was compounded by...
Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry—Tracer and TracerProvider
“There’s a lot to understand in OpenTelemetry; for instance, what is the difference between a Tracer and a TracerProvider? How should I use them?” OpenTelemetry...
Share Progress and Celebrate Wins With Demo Days
In my last blog post, I talked about the cadence of product planning and delivery at Honeycomb. Tucked away in there was a mention of...
Ask Miss O11y: Observability vs BI Tools & Data Warehouses
You probably have already answered this before, but do you have a good rule of thumb for where o11y [observability] ends and BI [business intelligence]/data...