Navigating Software Engineering Complexity With Observability
In the not-too-distant past, building software was relatively straightforward. The simplicity of LAMP stacks, Rails, and other well-defined web frameworks provided a stable foundation. Issues...
OpenTelemetry Best Practices #3: Data Prep and Cleansing
Having telemetry is all well and good—amazing, in fact. It’s easy to do: add some OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation libraries to your stack and they’ll fill your...
Framework for an Observability Maturity Model: Using Observability to Advance Your Engineering & Product
Everyone's talking about “observability,” but many don’t know what it is, what it’s for, or what benefits it offers. With this framing of observability in...
Investigating Mysterious Kafka Broker I/O When Using Confluent Tiered Storage
Earlier this year, we upgraded from Confluent Platform 7.0.10 to 7.6.0. While the upgrade went smoothly, there was one thing that was different from previous...
Independent, Involved, Informed, and Informative: The Characteristics of a CoPE
In part one of our CoPE series, we analogized the CoPE with safety departments. David Woods says that those safety departments must be: independent, involved,...
Virtualizing Our Storage Engine
Our storage engine, affectionately known as Retriever, has served us faithfully since the earliest days of Honeycomb. It’s a tool that writes data to disk...
Announcing Honeycomb Support Business Hours in Europe
Earlier this year, Honeycomb announced the launch of data residency in Europe. To meet the growing needs of our customers in the region, we are...
Establishing and Enabling a Center of Production Excellence
Software is in a crisis. This is nothing new. Complex distributed systems are perpetually in a state far from equilibrium, operating in what Richard Cook...
Empowering Engineering Excellence: Achieving a 26% Reduction in On-call Pages at Amperity with Modern Observability for Logs
Amperity required an observability partner to facilitate their transition into the modern engineering era as their previous tooling struggled to support their growth strategy....
The Cost Crisis in Metrics Tooling
In my February 2024 piece The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling, I explained why the cost of tools built atop the three pillars of metrics,...
Observability, Telemetry, and Monitoring: Learn About the Differences
Over the past five years, software and systems have become increasingly complex and challenging for teams to understand. A challenging macroeconomic environment, the rise of...
Understanding OpenTelemetry’s Browser Instrumentation
Recently, Honeycomb released a Web Instrumentation package built around the OpenTelemetry browser JS packages. In this post, I’ll go over what the OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation package...
How to Use Relational Fields: Some Nifty Use Cases
We recently introduced relational fields, a new feature that allows you to query spans based on their relationship to each other within a trace. This...
Rocking the Logs: Fender's Journey to Modern Observability
Fender faced challenges with log analysis, finding it slow and complex to navigate, leading to inefficient troubleshooting and a need for a more user-friendly and...
Introducing Honeycomb for Frontend Observability: Get the Data You Need for Actionable Customer Experience Improvements
Honeycomb for Frontend Observability gives frontend developers the ability to quickly identify opportunities for optimization within their web app. This starts with better OpenTelemetry instrumentation,...