Understanding OpenTelemetry’s Browser Instrumentation
Recently, Honeycomb released a Web Instrumentation package built around the OpenTelemetry browser JS packages. In this post, I’ll go over what the OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation package...
Instrumenting a Demo App With OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb
A few days ago, I was in a meeting with a prospect who was just starting to try out OpenTelemetry. One of the things that...
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....
Safer Client-Side Instrumentation with Honeycomb's Ingest-Only API Keys
We're delighted to introduce our new Ingest API Keys, a significant step toward enabling all Honeycomb customers to manage their observability complexity simply, efficiently, and...
Avoid Stubbing Your Toe on Telemetry Changes
When you have questions about your software, telemetry data is there for you. Over time, you make friends with your data, learning what queries take...
Defensive Instrumentation Benefits Everyone
A lot of reasoning in content is predicated on the audience being in a modern, psychologically safe, agile sort of environment. It’s aspirational, so folks...
Ask Miss O11y: How Can I Convince My Organization to Invest in Instrumenting for Observability?
"Dear Miss O11y, I’ve been following Honeycomb for a long time, and I understand where the insights from observability fit in. But larger orgs haven’t...
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...
Datasets, Traces, and Spans—Oh My!
By giving an overview into datasets, traces, and spans, you’ll get a peek behind the curtain into how Honeycomb facilitates observability in the hopes of...
Webinar Recap: How to Avoid Being On Call With Under-Instrumented Tools
"It's expensive. It's difficult. Our APM works just fine." The three myths of observability can lead to being on call with under-instrumented tools. That's exactly...
Quickly Turn ALB/ELB Status Codes into an Issue-Seeking Heatmap
More often than not, as developers, when we get a report that a large customer is hitting 500 errors, there's a flurry of activity. What's...
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...
Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Distro for Java reaches 1.0 release
Today, the Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Distribution for Java reaches a major milestone with a 1.0 release. This is the first Honeycomb OTel Distro to come out...
startSpan vs. startActiveSpan
TL;DR: startSpan is easier and measures a duration. Use it if your work won’t create any subspans. startActiveSpan requires that you pass a callback for...
OpenTelemetry (OTel) Is Key to Avoiding Vendor Lock-in
The promise of OpenTelemetry is that it can help you avoid vendor lock-in by allowing you to instrument your applications once, then send that data...