Ask Miss O11y: To Metric or to Trace?
Dear Miss O11y, I remember reading quite interesting opinions from you about usage of metrics and traces in an application. Did you elaborate on those...
Ask Miss O11y: Is There a Beginner’s Guide On How to Add Observability to Your Applications?
Dear Miss O11y, I want to make my microservices more observable. Currently, I only have logs. I’ll add metrics soon, but I’m not really sure...
Ask Miss O11y: Error: missing ‘x-honeycomb-dataset’ header
Your API Key (in the x-honeycomb-team header) tells Honeycomb where to put your data. It specifies a team and an environment. Then, Honeycomb figures out...
How Do I Do Availability Checks in Honeycomb?
Let’s dig into what we mean by an Availability Check and how that maps to observability, tracing, and supporting production systems....
Ask Miss O11y: How Can I Convince My Organization to Invest in Instrumenting for Observability?
"Dear Miss O11y, I’ve been following Honeycomb for a long time, and I understand where the insights from observability fit in. But larger orgs haven’t...
Ask Miss O11y: What Should An "Observability Team" Do?
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...
Ask Miss O11y: My Manager Won't Let Me Spend Any Time Instrumenting My Code
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...
Going On Call for the First Time
Miss O11y addresses common concerns of being on call and provides helpful advice on how to overcome any fear it may bring....
What the Hell is Activity Anyway?
Dear Miss O11y, I use .NET and I keep seeing something called `Activity` but in OpenTelemetry there is only talk about “Span” and “Trace,” why?...
Ask Miss O11y: As a developer, how can I try out observability?
Dear Miss o11y, What's the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for...
Ask Miss O11y: Is the OpenTelemetry Collector useful?
Dear Miss O11y, I’ve been told I need to use the OpenTelemetry Collector, but I have no idea what it is, or why I need...
Ask Miss O11y: Not Your Aunt’s Tracing
Dear Miss O11y, How is modern observability using tracing, such as Honeycomb, different from the previous distributed tracing software I'm familiar with, like Dapper, at...
Ask Miss O11y: When should you delete instrumentation?
When do you delete instrumentation? You delete instrumentation when you delete code. Other than that, if you’re doing things right: almost never. One of the...
Ask Miss O11y: Baggage in OTel
Miss O11y is delighted to welcome our newest band member: Martin Thwaites! Martin has been a member of the Honeycomb user community practically since its...
Ask Miss O11y: Logs vs. Traces
Tracing looks like a lot of work. We already have logs. Why bother adding traces? Ah, good question! TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show...