Effortless Engineering: Quick Tips for Crafting Prompts
Large Language Models (LLMs) are all the rage in software development, and for good reason: they provide crucial opportunities to positively enhance our software. At...
Start with Traces, not with Logs: How Honeycomb Helped Massdriver Reduce Alert Fatigue
Before Massdriver, Dave worked in product engineering where he was constantly bogged down with DevOps toil. He spent his time doing everything except what he...
OpenTelemetry For Humans
Who is software for? It’s an interesting question, because there’s an obvious answer. It’s for the users, right? If your job is to write software,...
What Happens to DevOps when the Kubernetes Adrenaline Rush Ends?
Kubernetes has been around for nearly 10 years now. In the past five years, we’ve seen a drastic increase in adoption by engineering teams of...
A Vicious Cycle: Data Hidden Behind Lock and Key
Understanding production has historically been reserved for software developers and engineers. After all, those folks are the ones building, maintaining, and fixing everything they deliver...
So We Shipped an AI Product. Did it Work?
Like many companies, earlier this year we saw an opportunity with LLMs and quickly (but thoughtfully) started building a capability. About a month later, we...
What Is a Feature Flag? Best Practices and Use Cases
Do you want to build software faster and release it more often without the risks of negatively impacting your user experience? Imagine a world where...
Rescue Struggling Pods from Scratch
Containers are an amazing technology. They provide huge benefits and create useful constraints for distributing software. Golang-based software doesn’t need a container in the same...
LLMs Demand Observability-Driven Development
Many software engineers are encountering LLMs for the very first time, while many ML engineers are being exposed directly to production systems for the very...
Experiments in Daily Work
In high school chemistry and then college physics labs, we learned a strong definition of "experiment." Experiments are tied to the Scientific Method, responsible for...
One-Click Insights with Board Templates
Whether you’re a new Honeycomb user or a seasoned expert looking to uncover fresh insights, chances are you’ve sent tremendous amounts of data into Honeycomb...
OpenTelemetry Gotchas: Phantom Spans
At work, we use OpenTelemetry extensively to trace execution of our Haskell codebase. We struggled for several months with a mysterious tracing issue in our...
Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector to Kubernetes with Helm
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a useful application to have in your stack. However, deploying it has always felt a little time consuming: working out how...
Incident Review: What Comes Up Must First Go Down
On July 25th, 2023, we experienced a total Honeycomb outage. It impacted all user-facing components from 1:40 p.m. UTC to 2:48 p.m. UTC, during which...
Calculating Sampling’s Impact on SLOs and More
What do mall food courts and Honeycomb have in common? We both love sampling! Not only do we recommend it to many of our customers,...