Slicing Up—and Iterating on—SLOs
One of the main pieces of advice about Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is that they should focus on the user experience. Invariably, this leads to...
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...
Instrumenting Lambda with Traces: A Complete Example in Python
We’re big fans of AWS Lambda at Honeycomb. As you may have read, we recently made some major improvements to our storage engine by leveraging...
Honeycomb SLO Now Generally Available: Success, Defined.
Honeycomb now offers SLOs, aka Service Level Objectives. This is the second in a set of of essays on creating SLOs from first principles. Previously,...
2019: The Year Bee-hind Us
Once again we are at the end of another year, facing into the endless potential of the next one, and thinking back on the fun...
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...
Why I'm Grateful For Our Observability Community
It’s that season, when we take time to consider what we're grateful for and extend thanks to those we value and the experiences we treasure....
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...
Becoming A Manager of Engineering Managers: What You Need To Know
In October Charity Majors joined Ian Nowland [VP | Eng | Datadog] and Rich Archibold [Sr Dir | Eng | Intercom] in a live panel...
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...
So You Want To Build An Observability Tool...
I've said this before, but I'm saying it again: observability is not a synonym for monitoring, and there are no three pillars. The pillars are...