Blog

Posts by Martin Thwaites

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…...

OpenTelemetry   Observability  

Monitoring Cloud Database Costs with OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb

In the last few years, the usage of databases that charge by request, query, or insert—rather than by provisioned compute infrastructure (e.g., CPU, RAM, etc.)—has...

Observability   Ask Miss O11y  

How Do I Do Availability Checks in Honeycomb?

Let’s dig into what we mean by an Availability Check and how that maps to observability, tracing, and supporting production systems....

OpenTelemetry  

Running the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps

In this post, we’ll look at how to host the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps. There are a few gotchas with how it’s deployed,...

OpenTelemetry   Monitoring  

Monitoring Unit Tests with OpenTelemetry in .NET

In this post, we’ll look at how you can use OpenTelemetry to monitor your unit tests and send that data to Honeycomb to visualize. It’s...

Observability   Featured  

Authors' Cut—Not-So-Distant Early Warning: Making the Move to Observability-Driven Development

Observability is about understanding systems, which means more than just production. Moving from logs to tracing and showing causality can be done locally, as well....

OpenTelemetry   Observability  

Adding Code Tags to Your OpenTelemetry Spans

One of the reasons that OpenTelemetry is great at doing this is that a lot of the common attributes you may find on a span...

Instrumentation   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: My Manager Won't Let Me Spend Any Time Instrumenting My Code

In the same way as the business is likely ok with you writing developer-based tests (unit, automation, integration), instrumentation is the same. The conversation we...

Observability   Logging  

Ingesting HTTP Access Logs from AppService

Debugging application performance in Azure AppService is something that’s quite difficult using Azure’s built-in services (like Application Insights). Among some of the issues are visualizations,...

OpenTelemetry   Ask Miss O11y  

What the Hell is Activity Anyway?

Dear Miss O11y, I use .NET and I keep seeing something called `Activity` but in OpenTelemetry there is only talk about “Span” and “Trace,” why?...

Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: Is the OpenTelemetry Collector useful?

Dear Miss O11y, I’ve been told I need to use the OpenTelemetry Collector, but I have no idea what it is, or why I need...

Tracing   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: Baggage in OTel

Miss O11y is delighted to welcome our newest band member: Martin Thwaites! Martin has been a member of the Honeycomb user community practically since its...

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