As a Customer Advocate, I talk to a lot of prospective Honeycomb users who want to understand how observability fits into their existing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice. While I have a passing familiarity with the discipline, I wanted to learn more about what SREs do in their day-to-day work so that I’d be better able to help them determine if Honeycomb is a good fit for their needs.

We often get questions about the difference between using our Beeline SDKs compared with other integrations, especially OpenTelemetry (abbreviated "OTel"). That’s why the team decided to do some integration dogfooding by instrumenting our own code with OpenTelemetry alongside existing Beeline instrumentation.

Every once in a while, teams or systems hit an inflection point where enough things change at once and the pattern of incidents shifts. We found ourselves at an inflection point like that last week.

Have you heard the buzz about observability with Honeycomb 🐝? It’s the best tool on the market for observing your systems in real time to reduce toil and delight users. But don’t listen to us, listen to our kickass community of “Pollinators”--this blog post is dedicated to them 💖

At ecobee, adopting Honeycomb started as a grassroots effort. Engineers signed up for the free tier and quickly started sharing insights with teammates. When it came time for ecobee to make the “build vs. buy” decision for observability tooling, sticking with Honeycomb was the clear choice.

Honeycomb's event-based pricing model is pretty simple: we only care about how many events you send. For teams running workloads at scale, the question becomes: are all of my events worth keeping? How can you reduce overall event volume while maintaining fidelity? This HoneyByte is all about sampling strategies you can use to lower costs without sacrificing the value of your data.

We’ve released some improvements to our Java Beeline library! Allow me to share all the interesting new features. Hot topics: Spring Boot Sleuth Starter, JDBC auto-instrumentation, Simplified Beeline Builder, W3C and AWS trace header propagation.