Feature Focus: A Six-Week Progress Recap – September 2024

Over the past six weeks, we introduced a series of impactful updates aimed at making your observability workflows faster, more unified, and more collaborative. 

Here’s a snapshot of what we worked on:

Unified: streamlined log capabilities for better analysis

We made several enhancements to simplify sending logs and leveraging them in investigations: 

• Improved OTel Collector & documentation: In version 0.107.0, we introduced a log processor that deduplicates noisy logs, cutting log volume by 40% during our internal Kubernetes testing. This efficiency comes without losing important signals. Additionally, we contributed updates to the OTel logs documentation, reflecting our commitment to contributing back upstream.
• Explore Data tab: This key part of our logs initiative allows customers to interact with logs similarly to dedicated logging tools, but with the power of Honeycomb’s analysis-first approach. Enhancements include:
  • Full pagination support (no more 1,000-row limits).
  • Jump to specific events in time.
  • Share URLs with your team with preserved results and time ranges.
  • Reorder columns for better organization.
  • Export up to 1,000 rows directly from the start of a query.
• OTel JS enhancements: We introduced a Semantic Conventions package along with an auto-configured log exporter in our OpenTelemetry JavaScript update, providing better data clarity.

Fast: accelerating your workflow

Speed is crucial, and we took significant steps to help you get answers faster and more efficiently:

• Derived columns in Query Builder: You can now create derived columns directly from the WHERE clause, enabling you to easily reuse filters across queries. Future updates will bring even more flexibility, with ad hoc derived columns in development.
• New visualizations: We added p80 and p20 visualizations to our Query Builder, giving you faster ways to get more granular insights into your data.
• Refinery updates: Versions 2.8.1 and 2.8.2 include multiple improvements for running Refinery at scale. These updates streamline operator time, improve the user experience, and make it more cost-effective.

Collaborative: building together through shared context 

Collaboration is crucial within engineering teams, so we’ve introduced updates to ensure that your team can work more effectively together:

• Accessibility improvements: It’s crucial that everyone on your team has access to the same tools and data. To make Honeycomb more accessible, we worked with an external accessibility expert to audit our interface. We made improvements to the way assistive technology, like screen readers, are able to navigate our product, resulting in better accessibility not only for those using assistive technology, but all of our users.
• Honeycomb Terraform provider 0.27.0: This update brings deletion protection to datasets and APIs, offering full lifecycle management of datasets. We also added new visualizations and filters, including p80 and an “ends-with” filter.
• Frequently used fields in Query Builder: To make onboarding easier, we added a list of frequently used fields and visualizations in Query Builder, helping new users get up to speed with their data more quickly.

For more info about our latest releases, check out our Changelog. Stay tuned for more exciting Honeycomb updates!