In last week’s piece, we talked about some of the factors that are driving costs up, both good and bad, and about whether your observability bill is (or should be) more of a cost center or an investment. In this piece, I’m going to talk more in depth about cost drivers and levers of control.

The session.id field is special in Honeycomb for Frontend Observability. It’s a default option for filtering and grouping, and it’s the basis for session timeline analysis (in Early Access). Now you can control how session.id is set.

The idea that telemetry data needs to be managed, or needs a strategy, draws a lot of inspiration from the data world (as in, BI and Data Engineering). Your company most likely has a data team that manages the data warehouse(s), data pipelines, data sources, and reporting tools. These teams are also constantly balancing costs with their user and stakeholder needs, usability, data retention, granularity, etc. Sound familiar? That’s because if you’re working on observability data, these teams are at least several years ahead of you in addressing these tradeoffs and considerations—and can teach us quite a lot. 

In 2018, I dashed off a punchy little blog post in which I observed that teams with good observability seemed to spend around ~20-30% of their infra bill to get it. I also noted this was based on absolutely no data, only my own experiences and a bunch of anecdotes, heavily weighted towards startups and the mid-market tech sector.

Seems like you can’t throw a rock without hitting an announcement about a Model Context Protocol server release from your favorite application or developer tool. While I could just write a couple hundred words about the Honeycomb MCP server, I’d rather walk you through the experience of building it, some of the challenges and successes we’ve seen while building and using it, and talk through what’s next. It should be pretty exciting, so strap in!

We’re excited to share that Honeycomb has completed our first-ever acquisition: we’re joining forces with Grit, bringing aboard not only a strong team but also compelling technology that supercharges our ability to deliver on our mission: to bring observability to every software engineer.

Observability is way more about software engineering than it is about operations. Operators are users of observability data for monitoring and alerting on systems. They’ll use that telemetry data to scale systems, or potentially debug the outside of applications. In contrast, software engineers are creators, designers, and users of observability data, and where they use that data is much wider than that of pure operators of production systems.

You can’t throw a rock without hitting an online discussion about ‘vibe coding,’ so I figured I’d add some signal to the noise and discuss how I’ve been using AI-driven coding tools with observability platforms like Honeycomb over the past six months. This isn’t an exhaustive guide, and not everything I say is going to be useful to everyone—but hopefully it will clear up some common misconceptions and help folks out.

At Honeycomb, we believe that observability should be accessible, effective, and transformative. That’s why our customer education team is thrilled to introduce Honeycomb Academy, a learning hub designed to help our customers of all experience levels master observability, OpenTelemetry, and the Honeycomb platform.

At Honeycomb, we’re actively growing our design system, Lattice, to ensure accessibility, optimize performance, and establish consistent design patterns across our product. One metric we use to measure Lattice is the adoption of components across the product. Adoption is about understanding how, where, and why they’re being used.

CloudWatch metrics can be a very useful source of information for a number of AWS services that don’t produce telemetry as well as instrumented code. There are also a number of useful metrics for non-web-request based functions, like metrics on concurrent database requests. We use them at Honeycomb to get statistics on load balancers and RDS instances. The Amazon Data Firehose is able to export directly to Honeycomb as well, which makes getting the data into Honeycomb straightforward.

How many of you started with technologies you still use exactly the same way today? Even if you’re a master Lisp/Clojure developer, you’ve still evolved, right? I should really get my head around those parentheses some day.