If you let all the power drift over to the engineering managers, pretty soon it doesn’t look so great to be an engineer. Now you have people becoming managers for all the wrong reasons, or everyone saying they want to be a manager, or engineers tuning out and turning in their homework (or quitting). We all want autonomy and impact, we all crave a seat at the table. You need to work harder to save those seats for non-managers.

People use “observability team” as a catchall basket for all kinds of things these days—from cutting-edge tech to truly heinous hacks. Eh, it is what it is. The industry may be in a roiling state of massive flux, but I’m cautiously excited about the changes beginning to take shape and emerge from the muck. And I definitely think it’s worth spending some time talking about what observability teams can and should be.

Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) are used to rank the performance of mobile sites or pages. It’s easy to see when your CWV scores are low, but it’s not always clear exactly why that’s happening. In Honeycomb’s new guide, Tracking Core Web Vitals with Honeycomb and Vercel, you can learn how to capture, analyze, and debug your real-world CWV performance using a free Honeycomb account.

We’ve wondered, in the past, what new engineers think about how we do things at Honeycomb. This time, we asked! Meet Elliott and Reid, two of our engineers that recently hit their 90 day mark. Along with the title question, we also asked about their prior companies, how we differ, and what surprised them most about working here.

One of the reasons that OpenTelemetry is great at doing this is that a lot of the common attributes you may find on a span are given standard names, so the systems receiving the data to visualize them don’t need to know the specifics of your system. This is really a superpower of OpenTelemetry, as it gives a level playing field for consumers of that information—meaning that you, as a developer, can forget about vendor-specific things.

If you get CI/CD right, a lot of other critical functions, behaviors, and intuitions align to be comfortably successful and correct with minimal effort. If you get it wrong, you will spend countless cycles chasing pathologies. It’s like choosing to eat your vegetables every day vs choosing a diet of cake and soda for fifty years, then playing whack-a-mole with all the symptoms manifesting on your poor, moldering body.

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 need to have is that instrumentation, or knowing the system is healthy, is the work we need to do for the feature. In my opinion, it’s even more important than those.

At Intercom, we focus on customer experience above all—our service’s availability and performance is our top priority. That requires a strong culture of observability across our teams and systems. As a result, we invest a lot in the reliability of our application. But unpredictable failures are inevitable, and when they happen it’s humans that fix them.

In this blog, we’ll dive into debugging with the Core Analysis Loop, the functional requirements for a backend datastore that make this possible, and whether it makes sense to build or buy your own observability solution.

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 arriving at a place where identifying the source of errors, finding performance problems, or understanding how data flows through a large system is made easier.

“How do I get started on instrumentation with OpenTelemetry, while also following best practices for the long-term?” This article is all about taking you from A to Z on instrumentation. Learn how to create immediate observability and see traces in your application right away, without changing code—and more!

Here's what some of our customers had to say about Honeycomb features that they found value in right away.