Ask Miss O11y: Tracing Is for Async, Too
I have a good sense of how to use traces to understand my system’s behavior within request/response cycles. What about multi-request processes? What about async...
Hone Your Observability Skills at Honeycomb Developer Week
Is the lack of time holding you back from sharpening your observability (o11y) skills? Maybe you’ve dipped your toes into o11y, but you’re not sure...
Scaling Kafka at Honeycomb
When you send telemetry into Honeycomb, our infrastructure needs to buffer your data before processing it in our "retriever" columnar storage database. For the entirety...
Ask Miss O11y: Mapping Out Your Observability Journey
Dear Miss O11y: It feels so overwhelming to get started with observability. I want to use Honeycomb, but it feels like I can't justify spending...
Ask Miss O11y: I Don't Want to Be On Call Anymore. Am I a Monster?
“Can a subject matter expert ever step down?” Have you written anything about how to solve the ‘nobody wants to be on-call as a subject matter expert...
Incident Resolution: Do You Remember, the Twenty Fires of September?
From September to early October, Honeycomb declared five public incidents. Internally, the whole month was part of a broader operational burden, where over 20 different...
Game Launches Should Be Exciting for Your Players, Not for Your LiveOps Team
This blog was co-authored by Amy Davis. The moment of launching something new at a game studio (titles, experiences, features, subscriptions) is a blockbuster moment...
Cut Out Time Estimates on Roadmaps: Get Into a Product Delivery Rhythm
All of the business of software, but especially the delivery of product capabilities, is inextricably bound up in questions about time. What’s the estimate? If...
Stand-Up Meetings Are Dead (and What to Do Instead)
Stand-up meetings. Is anyone happy with them at this point? They were supposed to help teams work in a more agile manner but they were...
How Honeycomb Is Using $50M in New Funding to Bring Observability to All
Today, we announced that Honeycomb has raised $50M in Series C funding, in a round led by Insight Partners and joined by all existing investors...
Vendor Switching With OpenTelemetry (OTel)
You might already know that OpenTelemetry is the future of instrumentation. It's an open-source and vendor-neutral instrumentation framework that frees you from the trap of...
The Magic of Metrics—and How It Can Burn You
As product developers, our responsibility continues beyond shipping code. To keep our software running, we need to notice whether it’s working in production. To make...
How Time Series Databases Work—and Where They Don't
In my previous post, we explored why Honeycomb is implemented as a distributed column store. Just as interesting to consider, though, is why Honeycomb is...
Honeycomb Differentiators Series: SLOs That Tell the Whole Story
In the recent past, most engineering teams had a vague notion of what Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) were—mainly things that...
Announcing General Availability of the Honeycomb Query Data API
The Query Data API is a Honeycomb Enterprise feature. With a Honeycomb Enterprise account, you can use this API today. Head over to our API...