One of the issues with the W3C trace context is that it doesn’t define any standards for how far a trace is to propagate. If a third party accidentally sends trace headers from their service, you’ll use their trace IDs and baggage data. This can have unwanted affects on your telemetry backend, such as the trace showing missing root spans, or including multiple API calls in a single trace at the top level. This makes understanding and debugging trace data hard. Worse though, the baggage data from the third party could contain PII data, which would therefore mean you’re processing PII without realizing it.

Engineers often feel they aren’t allowed enough time to address tech debt. Product partners wonder why engineers spend so much time working on it—or at least talking about it. “The business” always seems to insinuate that engineers should do less of it, instead focusing on shipping value to customers. And despite all this, many engineering leaders worry their teams may actually be under-investing in tech debt, in ways that could negatively impact the business over the long term.

The OpenTelemetry Go project now supports automatic instrumentation via eBPF! This is a big milestone for the project and makes it significantly easier to generate data from your Go apps.

It's rare to have too much telemetry—it's not often that someone says "I wish I didn't have all this information!" However, telemetry is data, and data is not necessarily information—particularly when you’re drowning in it. Honeycomb's query engine is so fast and powerful that many customers can send us all their telemetry. As we say on our stickers, "The Backend Can Handle It."

Incident management is the way an organization reacts to any kind of outage (security, broken code, severe weather, or anything that’s disruptive to customer service). Incidents are inherently fraught, not just because they’re time consuming and costly, but because they can potentially poison the well with customers, investors, and even partners. 

In this post, we’re going to lay out the guiding principle that unifies the diverse world of CS as we see it—and show how we put it into practice.

Charity once said an off-hand sentence that became a mantra for my transition into the VP of Engineering role: “Directors run the company.” This was said in the context of thinking about how the various management roles around the company interact: line managers run teams and projects, directors run the day-to-day work of the company, and execs (including VPs) focus above all on strategy, external-facing matters, and longer-term planning for the company’s future. 

Each CWV measures a specific part of the end user experience. CWV scores can help identify gaps in web page performance. Additionally, Google uses CWV scores as one of the measures it uses to rank pages, which means they are important for SEO.

In February of 2020, I was promoted from Director of Engineering to Honeycomb’s first VP of Engineering. Although Charity wrote an extremely generous public announcement, I hesitated to talk about this new role for quite a while as I was figuring out the job. But since 2020, I’ve noticed how little candid writing there is about paths to the VPE role or what the job is really like.* 

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 they include observability for the first time ever in their newly revamped 2022 Magic Quadrant for APM & [now] Observability, but they also put us in the Leader Quadrant—our debut appearance!

Honeycomb has the ability to receive events from application. These events can take the shape of Honeycomb wide events, OpenTelemetry trace spans, and OpenTelemetry metrics. Because Honeycomb’s backend is very flexible, these OpenTelemetry signals fit in just fine—but sometimes, they have a few quirks. Let’s dive into using metrics the Honeycomb way and cover a few optimizations.

n technical support, ensuring customer satisfaction and quickly resolving issues are of utmost importance. At Honeycomb, we embrace a comprehensive approach by using our own platform—not only for engineering purposes, but to also empower our support team.