Is Honeycomb a monitoring tool?

Monitoring Observability
Charity Majors

By: Charity Majors |

Monitoring Observability

2 Min. Read

Try now

You may notice that we don’t talk about “monitoring” much, and that’s because we don’t really think of monitoring as what we do, even though it kind of is.

Traditional monitoring relies heavily on predicting how a system may fail and checking for those failures. Traditional graphing involves generating big grids of dashboards that sit on your desktop or your wall, and give you a sense of the health of your system.

That’s not what we do.

Honeycomb is what you do when your monitoring ends.

You still need some simple end-to-end checks for your KPIs, and monitoring for key code paths, but don’t try to “monitor everything” because it’s noisy and impossible. One of two things will happen:

  1. Your e2e checks will tell you that one of your KPIs is not within acceptable range. (So you jump into honeycomb and start asking questions.)
  2. A user tells you something is off, but your KPIs are all within acceptable ranges. (So you jump in to honeycomb and start asking questions.)

You can start at the edge and drill down, or start at the end and trace back; either way, within a half dozen clicks you can usually identify the source of the anomaly.

Honeycomb is a debugger for live production systems. Honeycomb is to your systems like your IDE is to your code. For sufficiently complex systems, you should probably spend roughly equal time in both.

Honeycomb lets you ask questions of your live systems, swiftly and interactively. Often you will spot an outlier or correlation that you weren’t expecting – something that never happens when you’re doing intuition-based debugging instead of data-driven debugging. Validate your guesses swiftly and move on.

This will make you a better engineer. 🙂

Systems are getting more complex every day, outstripping our ability to predict failure conditions or alert on suspicious symptoms. Stop trying to debug via intuition or what you can remember about past outages. Just keep it simple:

  1. Alert on KPIs
  2. Instrument your systems
  3. Ask lots of questions
x icon linkedin icon youtube icon facebook icon
Don’t forget to share!
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

CTO

Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io. She pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly). She loves free speech, free software and single malt scotch.

Related posts

APM from a Developer’s Perspective

Jessica Kerr |

APM From a Developer’s Perspective

In twenty years of software development, I did not have the privilege of being on call, of tending to my software in production. I’ve never understood what “APM” means. Anybody can tell me what it stands for—Application Performance Monitoring (or sometimes, the M means Management)—but what does it mean? What do people use APM for? Now, I work at an observability company—and still, no one can give me a satisfying definition of “APM.” So I did some research, and now the use of APM makes sense from a few angles.

Monitoring Observability
What Is Application Performance Monitoring?

Rox Williams |

What Is Application Performance Monitoring?

Application performance monitoring, also known as APM, represents the difference between code and running software. You need the measurements in order to manage performance.

Monitoring Software Engineering
Monitoring Unit Tests with OpenTelemetry in .NET

Martin Thwaites |

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 important to note that you don’t need to adopt Honeycomb, or even OpenTelemetry, in your production application to get the benefit of tracing. This example uses OpenTelemetry purely in the test project and provides great insights into our customer’s code.

Monitoring OpenTelemetry