Charity Majors
CTO
Charity is an ops engineer and accidental startup founder at honeycomb.io. Before this she worked at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab on infrastructure and developer tools, and always seemed to wind up running the databases. She is the co-author of O’Reilly’s Database Reliability Engineering, and loves free speech, free software, and single malt scotch.
Is it Time to Version Observability? Signs Point to Yes
In 2016, we at Honeycomb first borrowed the term “observability” from the wikipedia entry for control systems observability, where it is a measure of your...
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,...
The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling
The cost of services is on everybody’s mind right now, with interest rates rising, economic growth slowing, and organizational budgets increasingly feeling the pinch. But...
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...
We Did it Again: We’re a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for APM & Observability for the Second Year in a Row
When the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report came out in 2022, we did the professional equivalent of a spit take, then cheered wildly. NOT ONLY did...
Deploys Are the ✨WRONG✨ Way to Change User Experience
I'm no stranger to ranting about deploys. But there's one thing I haven't sufficiently ranted about yet, which is this: Deploying software is a terrible,...
Honeycomb Welcomes New Field CTO
I am thrilled to share with you that Honeycomb now has a Field CTO: our very own Liz Fong-Jones....
The Future of Ops Is Platform Engineering
In the beginning, there were people who wrote and ran software. At some point, we spun away ops skills from dev skills into two different...
An Engineer’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities
If you let all the power drift over to the engineering managers, pretty soon it doesn’t look so great to be an engineer. Now you...
Ask Miss O11y: What Should An "Observability Team" Do?
People use “observability team” as a catchall basket for all kinds of things these days—from cutting-edge tech to truly heinous hacks. Eh, it is what...
“Why Are My Tests So Slow?” A List of Likely Suspects, Anti-Patterns, and Unresolved Personal Trauma
If you get CI/CD right, a lot of other critical functions, behaviors, and intuitions align to be comfortably successful and correct with minimal effort. If...
Authors’ Cut—How Observability Differs from Traditional Monitoring
In this webinar based on our O'Reilly book, we go over the difference between observability and monitoring - and when to use which....
✨ The ✨ Book✨ Is ✨ Done✨
The book is done. The book is FINISHED. There will be no more writing of the book! Holy macaroni. If you think you might be...
Ask Miss O11y: When should you delete instrumentation?
When do you delete instrumentation? You delete instrumentation when you delete code. Other than that, if you’re doing things right: almost never. One of the...
Ask Miss O11y: Do I Need Observability If My Stack Is Boring?
Observability came out of microservices and cloud-native, right? If you have a simpler architecture, does o11y matter?” — this question came up during recent office...