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Fred Hebert
Staff Site Reliability Engineer
Fred is a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) who has worked as a software engineer for over a decade and ended up with a healthy dislike of computers and clumsy automation. Heâs a published technical author who loves distributed systems, systems engineering, and has a strong interest in resilience engineering and human factors.
From Oops to Ops: SLOs Get Budget Rate Alerts
As someone living the Honeycomb ops life for a while, SLOs have been the bread and butter of our most critical and useful alerting. However,...
Incident Review: What Comes Up Must First Go Down
On July 25th, 2023, we experienced a total Honeycomb outage. It impacted all user-facing components from 1:40 p.m. UTC to 2:48 p.m. UTC, during which...
There Are No Repeat Incidents
People seem to struggle with the idea that there are no repeat incidents. It is very easy and natural to see two distinct outages, with...
How We Define SRE Work, as a Team
The SRE team is now four engineers and a manager, and we are involved in all sorts of things across the organization, across all sorts...
How We Manage Incident Response at Honeycomb
When I joined Honeycomb two years ago, we were entering a phase of growth where we could no longer expect to have the time to...
Counting Forest Fires: Incident Response Metrics
There are limits to what individuals or teams on the ground can do, and while counting fires or their acreage can be useful to know...
Incident Review: Shepherd Cache Delays
In this incident review, weâll cover the outage from September 8th, 2022, where our ingest system went down repeatedly and caused interruptions for over eight...
Incident Review: Working as Designed, But Still Failing
A few weeks ago, we had a couple of incidents that ended up impacting query performance and alerting via triggers and SLOs. These incidents were...
On Counting Alerts
A while ago, I wrote about how we track on-call health, and I heard from various people about how âexpecting to be woken upâ can...
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...
OnCallogy Sessions
Being on call is challenging. Itâs signing up to be operating complex services in a totally interruptible manner, at all hours of the day or...
On the Brittleness of Dashboards
Dashboards are one of the most basic and popular tools software engineers use to operate their systems. In this post, I'll make the argument that...
How We Define SRE Work
At the time of writing this post, I have officially been at Honeycomb for one year as a site reliability engineer (SRE). I had shared...
Incident Resolution: Do You Remember, the Twenty Fires of September?
From September to early October, Honeycomb declared five public incidents. Internally, the whole month was part of a broader operational burden, where over 20 different...
Data Availability Isnât Observability
But itâs better than nothing... Most of the industry is racing to adopt better observability practices, and theyâre discovering lots of power in being able...