What’s That Collector Doing?
The Collector is one of many tools that the OpenTelemetry project provides end users to use in their observability journey. It is a powerful mechanism...
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...
Service Level Objectives as Code: Terraforming Honeycomb SLOs
In March, we announced official support for a Honeycomb Terraform Provider. Today, we’re announcing additional support for managing Honeycomb Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with Terraform....
Engineering Levels at Honeycomb: Avoiding the Scope Trap
It has been seven years since Rent the Runway posted their engineering ladder, kicking off a veritable trend of engineering teams open sourcing their ladders....
Tracking On-Call Health
If you have an on-call rotation, you want it to be a healthy one. But this is sort of hard to measure because it has...
The Present and Future of Arm and AWS Graviton at Honeycomb
As many of you may have read, Amazon has released C7g instances powered by the highly anticipated AWS Graviton3 Processors. As we shared at re:Invent...
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...
Quickly Turn ALB/ELB Status Codes into an Issue-Seeking Heatmap
More often than not, as developers, when we get a report that a large customer is hitting 500 errors, there's a flurry of activity. What's...
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...
✨ The ✨ Book✨ Is ✨ Done✨
The book is done. The book is FINISHED. There will be no more writing of the book! Holy macaroni. If you think you might be...
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...
Observability for New Teams: Part 1
Any significant shift in an organization’s software engineering culture has the potential to feel tectonic, and observability (o11y for short)—or more specifically, Observability Driven Development—is...