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...
Reducing Mean Time to Diagnosis: How Salary Finance Uses Honeycomb to Ask the Right Questions
Salary Finance is a UK-based financial well-being employee benefit program. Over the last seven years, the company grew from a startup to a scaleup, earning...
Trace Propagation and Public API Endpoints in .NET: Part 1 (Disable All)
One of the issues with the W3C trace context is that it doesn’t define any standards for how far a trace is to propagate. If...
Anything But Tech Debt
Engineers often feel they aren’t allowed enough time to address tech debt. Product partners wonder why engineers spend so much time working on it—or at...
Automatic Instrumentation for OpenTelemetry Go
The OpenTelemetry Go project now supports automatic instrumentation via eBPF! This is a big milestone for the project and makes it significantly easier to generate...
The Evolution of Sampling in Honeycomb: Introducing Refinery 2.0
It's rare to have too much telemetry—it's not often that someone says "I wish I didn't have all this information!" However, telemetry is data, and...
Incident Management Steps and Best Practices
Incident management is the way an organization reacts to any kind of outage (security, broken code, severe weather, or anything that’s disruptive to customer service)....
Evolving by Involving
In this post, we’re going to lay out the guiding principle that unifies the diverse world of CS as we see it—and show how we...
On Becoming a VP of Engineering, Part 2: Doing the Job
Charity once said an off-hand sentence that became a mantra for my transition into the VP of Engineering role: “Directors run the company.” This was...
Observing Core Web Vitals with OpenTelemetry
Each CWV measures a specific part of the end user experience. CWV scores can help identify gaps in web page performance. Additionally, Google uses CWV...
On Becoming a VP of Engineering, Part 1: The Path to VP
In February of 2020, I was promoted from Director of Engineering to Honeycomb’s first VP of Engineering. Although Charity wrote an extremely generous public announcement,...
We Did it Again: We’re a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for APM & Observability for the Second Year in a Row
When the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report came out in 2022, we did the professional equivalent of a spit take, then cheered wildly. NOT ONLY did...
How Metrics Behave in Honeycomb
Honeycomb has the ability to receive events from application. These events can take the shape of Honeycomb wide events, OpenTelemetry trace spans, and OpenTelemetry metrics....