Bring Test Engineering into your DevOps practice
What do a test engineer and a DevOps or SRE team member have in common? The reality is that different teams need to proactively understand...
Getting At The Good Stuff: How To Sample Traces in Honeycomb
(This is the first post by our new head of Customer Success, Irving.) Sampling is a must for applications at scale; it’s a technique for...
How To Make Your Customers Happy, with Eaze
"Success is a catastrophe that you have to survive." -- CJ Silverio A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of hosting CJ...
From "Secondary Storage" To Just "Storage": A Tale of Lambdas, LZ4, and Garbage Collection
When we introduced Secondary Storage two years ago, it was a deliberate compromise between economy and performance. Compared to Honeycomb’s primary NVMe storage attached to...
Incident Report: Running Dry on Memory Without Noticing
On November 6, 2019, we intermittently rejected 1-3% of customer telemetry data at ingest for four periods of 20 minutes each. The trigger of the...
OpenTelemetry vs OpenTracing | Understanding OpenCensus and Related Terms
There’s been a fair bit of buzz lately about OpenTelemetry, which is the next major version of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. The leadership of...
Working Toward Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Part 1
In theory, Honeycomb is always up. Our servers run without hiccups, our user interface loads rapidly and is highly responsive, and our query engine is...
Working On Hitting a Release Cadence? CI/CD Observability Can Help You Get There
We recently sponsored our partner CloudBees' conference DevOps World & JenkinsWorld in San Francisco and our message “Observe how Customers Experience Your Build” resonated well...
The Path from Unstructured Logs to Observability
Are you starting out on your journey toward observability? Do you have a mandate from management, or are you a lone warrior in the matrix?...
Never Alone On Call
Does your organization have an on-call rotation? Several members of the Honeycomb engineering team recently hosted a live webcast about why they never feel alone...
Taming A Game-Changer: Honeycomb and GraphQL at VendHQ
This guest post is from Evan Shaw, Lead Engineer at vendhq.com. GraphQL: a game-changer GraphQL is a query language for APIs. It allows you to...
Velocity (& Reliability) - Two must-haves for every software engineering team
(Field notes from O’Reilly’s Velocity 2019 Show, San Jose.) It was steamy hot in San Jose during O’Reilly’s Velocity show and the normally frigid AC...
Making Instrumentation Extensible
Observability-driven development requires both rich query capabilities and sufficient instrumentation in order to capture the nuances of developers' intention and useful dimensions of cardinality. When...
Toward a Maturity Model for Observability
Access to observability is becoming critical to organizations shipping software, running modern infrastructures in production, and to understanding how users are experiencing their service. To...
Dynamic Sampling by Example
Last week, Rachel published a guide describing the advantages of dynamic sampling. In it, we discussed varying sample rates to achieve a target collection rate...