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...
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...
What happens when a seasoned engineer goes on vacation?
Have you ever experienced a time when someone on your team takes off to recharge or takes unplanned downtime away from work? It may feel...
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...
"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,...
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,...
Getting At The Good Stuff: How To Sample Traces in Honeycomb
(This is the first post by our new head of Customer Success, Irving.) Sampling is a must for applications at scale; it’s a technique for...
Instrumenting Lambda with Traces: A Complete Example in Python
We’re big fans of AWS Lambda at Honeycomb. As you may have read, we recently made some major improvements to our storage engine by leveraging...
Honeycomb SLO Now Generally Available: Success, Defined.
Honeycomb now offers SLOs, aka Service Level Objectives. This is the second in a set of of essays on creating SLOs from first principles. Previously,...
2019: The Year Bee-hind Us
Once again we are at the end of another year, facing into the endless potential of the next one, and thinking back on the fun...
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...
From "Secondary Storage" To Just "Storage": A Tale of Lambdas, LZ4, and Garbage Collection
When we introduced Secondary Storage two years ago, it was a deliberate compromise between economy and performance. Compared to Honeycomb’s primary NVMe storage attached to...
Why I'm Grateful For Our Observability Community
It’s that season, when we take time to consider what we're grateful for and extend thanks to those we value and the experiences we treasure....
Incident Report: Running Dry on Memory Without Noticing
On November 6, 2019, we intermittently rejected 1-3% of customer telemetry data at ingest for four periods of 20 minutes each. The trigger of the...
OpenTelemetry vs OpenTracing | Understanding OpenCensus and Related Terms
There’s been a fair bit of buzz lately about OpenTelemetry, which is the next major version of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. The leadership of...