Charity Majors
CTO
Charity Majors is the co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io. She pioneered the concept of modern Observability, drawing on her years of experience building and managing massive distributed systems at Parse (acquired by Facebook), Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering (O’Reilly). She loves free speech, free software and single malt scotch.
How Much Should I Be Spending On Observability?
In last week’s piece, we talked about some of the factors that are driving costs up, both good and bad, and about whether your observability...
How Much Should I Be Spending On Observability?
In 2018, I dashed off a punchy little blog post in which I observed that teams with good observability seemed to spend around ~20-30% of...
Welcome Jessica Nunn To Our Board of Directors!
Ever since January of 2022, we have had an employee representative seated on our board of directors. Paul Osman was the first employee to hold...
Observability in the Age of AI
Honeycomb engineers were amongst the earliest adopters of this technology. Not in the widely parodied top-down, VP-mandated, “go be AI leaders nao plz” kind of...
There Is Only One Key Difference Between Observability 1.0 and 2.0
We’ve been talking about observability 2.0 a lot lately; what it means for telemetry and instrumentation, its practices and sociotechnical implications, and the dramatically different...
It's Time to Version Observability: Introducing Observability 2.0
In 2016, we at Honeycomb first borrowed the term “observability” from the wikipedia entry for control systems observability, where it is a measure of your...
The Cost Crisis in Metrics Tooling
In my February 2024 piece The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling, I explained why the cost of tools built atop the three pillars of metrics,...
The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling
The cost of services is on everybody’s mind right now, with interest rates rising, economic growth slowing, and organizational budgets increasingly feeling the pinch. But...
LLMs Demand Observability-Driven Development
Many software engineers are encountering LLMs for the very first time, while many ML engineers are being exposed directly to production systems for the very...
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...
Deploys Are the ✨WRONG✨ Way to Change User Experience
I'm no stranger to ranting about deploys. But there's one thing I haven't sufficiently ranted about yet, which is this: Deploying software is a terrible,...
Honeycomb Welcomes New Field CTO
I am thrilled to share with you that Honeycomb now has a Field CTO: our very own Liz Fong-Jones....
The Future of Ops Is Platform Engineering
In the beginning, there were people who wrote and ran software. At some point, we spun away ops skills from dev skills into two different...
An Engineer’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities
If you let all the power drift over to the engineering managers, pretty soon it doesn’t look so great to be an engineer. Now you...
Ask Miss O11y: What Should An "Observability Team" Do?
People use “observability team” as a catchall basket for all kinds of things these days—from cutting-edge tech to truly heinous hacks. Eh, it is what...