Blog

Posts by Martin Thwaites

Tutorials   OpenTelemetry  

Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector to AKS

The Collector is the focal point for telemetry inside your cluster. Instead of your containerized applications sending directly to your OpenTelemetry-capable backend (the place that...

OpenTelemetry  

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...

OpenTelemetry   Instrumentation  

OpenTelemetry Best Practices #2: Agents, Sidecars, Collectors, Coded Instrumentation

For years, we’ve been installing what vendors have referred to as “agents” that reach into our applications and pull out useful telemetry information from them....

OpenTelemetry  

OpenTelemetry Best Practices #1: Naming

Naming things, and specifically consistently naming things, is still one of the most useful pieces of work you can do in telemetry. It’s often overlooked...

OpenTelemetry  

Building a Secure OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a core part of telemetry pipelines, which makes it one of the parts of your infrastructure that must be as secure...

Sampling  

How to Avoid Paying for Honeycomb

You probably know that we have a generous free plan that allows you to send 20 million events per month. This is enough for many...

Software Engineering  

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...

OpenTelemetry  

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...

Tracing  

Trace Propagation and Public API Endpoints in .NET: Part 1 (Disable All)

One of the issues with the W3C trace context is that it doesn’t define any standards for how far a trace is to propagate. If...

Observability  

Don’t Let Observability Inflate Your Cloud Costs 

We saw a shift this year in how the technology sector honed in on sustainability from a cost perspective. In particular, looking at where they’re...

Tracing   Metrics   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: To Metric or to Trace?

Dear Miss O11y, I remember reading quite interesting opinions from you about usage of metrics and traces in an application. Did you elaborate on those...

OpenTelemetry  

Does OpenTelemetry in .NET Cause Performance Degradation?

Contrary to Betteridge’s Law of Tabloid Headlines, the answer to the question, "does OpenTelemetry in .NET cause performance degradation?" is yes, but context is important. I...

Logging  

Twelve-Factor Apps and Modern Observability

The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a go-to guide for people building microservices. In its time, it presented a step change in how we think about...

Observability   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: Is There a Beginner’s Guide On How to Add Observability to Your Applications?

Dear Miss O11y, I want to make my microservices more observable. Currently, I only have logs. I’ll add metrics soon, but I’m not really sure...

Tracing  

Understanding Distributed Tracing with a Message Bus

So you're used to debugging systems using a distributed trace, but your system is about to introduce a message queue—and that will work the same…...

1 2