Blog

Posts by Ben Hartshorne

Ben Hartshorne

Staff Engineer

Ben has spent much of his career setting up monitoring systems for startups and now is thrilled to help the industry see a better way. He is always eager to find the right graph to understand a service and will look for every excuse to include a whiteboard in the discussion.

Software Engineering   Service Level Objectives  

Exploring AWS Costs Beyond the Service Level

This post will talk about using a derived column to directly connect individual customer experiences to the cost of providing that service with AWS Lambda....

Dogfooding  

Tale of the Beagle (Or It Doesn’t Scale—Except When It Does)

If there’s one thing folks working in internet services love saying, it’s: Yeah, sure, but that won’t scale. It’s an easy complaint to make, but...

Operations   Dogfooding  

Incident Review: You Can't Deploy Binaries That Don't Exist

Between 22:50 and 22:54 UTC on July 9, our capacity to accept traffic to api.honeycomb.io gradually diminished until all incoming requests started to fail. 8...

Dogfooding   Debugging   Databases  

Stop Your Database From Hating You With This One Weird Trick

Let's not bury the lede here: we use Observability-Driven Development at Honeycomb to identify and prevent DB load issues. Like every online service, we experience...

Product Updates   Dogfooding  

Power to the People: Control Your Own Trigger Destiny with Webhooks

When we release something new, whether it's a new SDK or Beeline or a new feature in the UI, we'll often set a Honeycomb Trigger...

Product Updates   Instrumentation   Events  

The Honeycomb Beeline for Go v2 is...Go!

We've seen folks do amazing things using our Honeycomb Beelines--getting their apps instrumented in next-to-no time, expanding their observability, growing their understanding of what is...

Software Engineering   Observability   Dogfooding  

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...

Observability   Logging   Instrumentation   Events  

How Are Structured Logs Different From Events?

We're all collectively trying to define observability ("o11y," pronounced "olly") these days, and, as Honeycomb is sometimes described as an event-based observability product, trying to...

Observability   Instrumentation   Dogfooding  

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 6: Instrumenting a Production Service

This post continues our dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 5: The Correlations Are Not What They Seem. In a recent blog post,...

Observability   Events  

Event Foo: What Should I Add to an Event?

When we’re talking with people about how they should start using Honeycomb, many ask for guidance about what should go into an event. Though there...

Software Engineering   Observability   Instrumentation   Dogfooding   Debugging  

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 4: Check Before You Change

This post continues our dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 3: End-to-end Failures. As Honeycomb matures, we try to roll out changes as...

Product Updates   Operations   Monitoring  

Honeycomb Triggers - Alert on your Data

We’re happy to announce the launch of Honeycomb Triggers—a method to get notifications when the data you send in to Honeycomb crosses configured thresholds. We’d...

Databases   Connectors & Integrations  

The MySQL Slow Query Log, AWS Golang SDK, RDS and You

Did you know you can do fun things with the MySQL slow query log, using the nothing but the AWS golang SDK for RDS? It’s...

Debugging   Databases  

MySQL and Honeycomb: My First 10 Minutes

As part of the process of building our RDS connector for Honeycomb, we ran it on our own database logs. A few neat things came...

Product Updates   Connectors & Integrations  

Enriching Nginx Logs with request_time, Server Data, and Other Goodies

How can you make your nginx logs more awesome? Nginx has some fantastic data hiding in its log_format spec, but oddly enough, most of it...

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