Blog

Posts by Fred Hebert

Software Engineering  

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...

Incident Response  

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...

Incident Response  

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...

Debugging  

Incident Review: Shepherd Cache Delays

In this incident review, we’ll cover the outage from September 8th, 2022, where our ingest system went down repeatedly and caused interruptions for over eight...

Debugging  

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...

Service Level Objectives   Culture  

On Counting Alerts

A while ago, I wrote about how we track on-call health, and I heard from various people about how “expecting to be woken up” can...

Best Practices  

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...

Best Practices  

OnCallogy Sessions

Being on call is challenging. It’s signing up to be operating complex services in a totally interruptible manner, at all hours of the day or...

Software Engineering  

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...

Software Engineering  

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...

Software Engineering   Debugging  

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...

Service Level Objectives   Dogfooding  

Data Availability Isn’t Observability

But it’s better than nothing... Most of the industry is racing to adopt better observability practices, and they’re discovering lots of power in being able...

Software Engineering  

Lessons Learned From the Migration to Confluent Kafka

Over the last few months, Honeycomb’s platform team migrated to a new iteration of our ingest pipeline for customer events. Our migration to this newer...

Teams & Collaboration   Observability   Featured  

On Not Being a Cog in the Machine

This is my first week here as the first dedicated SRE for Honeycomb, and in a welcoming gesture, I was asked if I wanted to...