In a previous blog post, we outlined how to set up our own auto-instrumentation to send Core Web Vitals data to Honeycomb. We recently released a beta version of an OpenTelemetry wrapper to send traces from the browser to Honeycomb.

There’s a sentence that strikes fear into the heart of every frontend developer I've ever met: Users are reporting issues, and we don't know how to replicate them. What do you do when that happens? Do you cry? Do you mark the issue as wontfix and move on? Personally, I took the road less traveled: gave up frontend engineering and moved into product management (this is not actually accurate but it's a good joke and it feels truthy). 

We thought it'd be fun to give you some insights into what certain teams at Honeycomb do and how they spend their days, and who else would we start this experiment with than our fabulous customer success team? Without further ado, meet four of our bees!

As a new company poised to transform the financial services industry with its modern money movement platform, Moov wanted an equally modern observability platform as part of the company’s operational tech stack. 

For years, we’ve been installing what vendors have referred to as “agents” that reach into our applications and pull out useful telemetry information from them. From monitoring agents, to full-blown APM tools, this has been the standard for many decades. With OpenTelemetry though, the term “agent” isn’t used as much, and in most scenarios means something slightly different. In this post, we’ll talk about the fact that you can achieve the same “hands off” process with OpenTelemetry, but also when you should and shouldn’t consider using the more automatic approach to telemetry collection. 

We're excited to unveil a new collaboration with Focused Labs, a leap forward in our shared commitment to advancing modern observability practices and enhancing the robustness of legacy systems. This partnership is not just about scaling our service offerings but also about integrating Focused Labs' deep engineering expertise with our observability platform to deliver unparalleled customer experiences.

Naming things, and specifically consistently naming things, is still one of the most useful pieces of work you can do in telemetry. It’s often overlooked as something that will just happen naturally and won’t cause too much of an issue—but it doesn’t happen naturally, it does cause issues, and you end up having to fix the data in pipelines or your backend tool.

Phorest delivers a premier software solution that empowers their salon and spa business customers to thrive. Ensuring every engineer has access to an observability tool is integral to the company's success model, enabling them to deliver great code for their designated software services. However, Phorest encountered speedbumps with their New Relic setup that hindered this observability goal.

In this post, Chris describes how to send OpenTelemetry (OTel) data from an AWS Lambda instance to Honeycomb.

There are countless challenges around incident investigations and reports. Aside from sensitive situations revolving around blame and corrections, tricky problems come up when having discussions with multiple stakeholders. The problems I’ll explore in this blog—from the SRE perspective—are about time pressures (when to ship the investigation) and the type of report people expect.

There is so much good work that OpenTelemetry has done in the software industry, specifically around the domain of observability, in the last five years. Bringing users and vendors together to define the future of telemetry? Check! Unify logs, traces, and metrics under a completely vendor-neutral API? Check! Deprecate other standards by bringing their collaborators to the table to ensure their use cases are met? CHECK!

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.