Anatomy of a Cascading Failure
In Caches Are Good, Except When They Are Bad, we identified four separate problems that combined together to cause a cascading failure in our API...
When In Doubt, Add More Spans: A Tale of Tracing and Testing In Production
Recently, Toshok was telling a story about the kind of thing he talks about a lot—improving the performance of some endpoint or page or other....
Incident Review: Caches are Good, Except When They Are Bad
Between Wednesday, April 17th and Friday, April 26th, Honeycomb had four separate periods of downtime affecting the Honeycomb API, resulting in approximately 38 minutes of...
A New Bee's First Oncall
I'm Honeycomb's newest engineer, now on my eighth week at Honeycomb. Excitingly, I did my first week of oncall two weeks ago! Almost every engineer...
How To Talk to Your Boss About Honeycomb
At Honeycomb, we're pretty engineering-focused. We think our product is something every developer can benefit from, and we're working to build something we would want...
Spooky Tales of Testing In Production: A Recap and Lessons Learned
Happy December! Back in October, we cohosted a SPOOKY HALLOWEEN meetup with our pals at LaunchDarkly about testing in production. Here's a review of the...
The Core Analysis Loop, or: Heatmaps Make Analysis Better
In this blog miniseries, I'm talking about how to think about doing data analysis, the Honeycomb way. In Part I, I talked about how heatmaps...
Heatmaps Make Ops Better
In this blog miniseries, I'd like to talk about how to think about doing data analysis "the Honeycomb way." Welcome to part 1, where I...
Explore RubyGems data with Honeycomb
Our new RubyGems.org public dataset is now available — use it to analyze global download traffic of all gems hosted on RubyGems! About RubyGems.org RubyGems.org...
Level Up with Derived Columns: Two Neat Tricks That Will Improve Your Observability
When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t realize just...
Level Up With Derived Columns: Bucketing Events For Comparison
When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t...
Level Up With Derived Columns: Understanding Screen Size (With Basic Arithmetic)
When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t realize just...
Observability: A Manifesto
Everybody and their freaking grandpa is now claiming to do observability, not stodgy old monitoring. Fine, great. Nice to be trendy I guess. But are...
Resolving High CPU Usage in Kubernetes With Honeycomb
At Honeycomb, we’re excited about Kubernetes. In fact, we’re in the early stages of moving some of our services to k8s. Tools like kops have...
The New Best Engineer
If you make a habit of reading twitter or the writings of various thought lords and ladies of the internet, you’ve probably heard a lot...