Blog

Posts by Jessica Kerr

Dogfooding  

Developing with OpenAI and Observability

Honeycomb recently released our Query Assistant, which uses ChatGPT behind the scenes to build queries based on your natural language question. It's pretty cool. While...

Technical Deep Dives   Observability  

Observable Frontends: the State of OpenTelemetry in the Browser

The modern standard for observability in backend systems is: distributed traces with OpenTelemetry, plus dynamic aggregations over these events. This works very well in the...

Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: Error: missing ‘x-honeycomb-dataset’ header

Your API Key (in the x-honeycomb-team header) tells Honeycomb where to put your data. It specifies a team and an environment. Then, Honeycomb figures out...

Software Engineering  

Caring for Complex Systems: We Can Do This

When we work at it, professionals are pretty good at analysis. We can break down a simple system, look at its parts and their relations,...

Observability   Customer Stories  

NS1 Implements Honeycomb to Democratize Their Code and Spark Customer Joy

The line from observability to customer joy is straighter than you think. We recently learned this from NS1, a managed DNS provider and Honeycomb customer,...

OpenTelemetry  

Iterating on an OpenTelemetry Collector Deployment in Kubernetes

When you want to direct your observability data in a uniform fashion, you want to run an OpenTelemetry collector. If you have a Kubernetes cluster...

Instrumentation   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: How Can I Convince My Organization to Invest in Instrumenting for Observability?

"Dear Miss O11y, I’ve been following Honeycomb for a long time, and I understand where the insights from observability fit in. But larger orgs haven’t...

OpenTelemetry  

Send a Test Span Through an OpenTelemetry Collector

The scenario: you want to see distributed traces, maybe for your web app. You’ve set up an OpenTelemetry collector to receive OTLP traces in JSON...

Tracing   Debugging  

We Learn Systems by Changing Them

In the social world, there is no outside: we participate in the systems we study. I’ve noticed this in code: when I come to an...

Observability   Instrumentation  

Webinar Recap: How to Avoid Being On Call With Under-Instrumented Tools

"It's expensive. It's difficult. Our APM works just fine." The three myths of observability can lead to being on call with under-instrumented tools. That's exactly...

Observability  

Honeycomb Supports Service Ownership

The software industry is moving toward teams that own the services they build. This concept encloses principles and possibilities from movements toward microservices, DevOps, Agile,...

OpenTelemetry   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: As a developer, how can I try out observability?

Dear Miss o11y, What's the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for...

Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: Logs vs. Traces

Tracing looks like a lot of work. We already have logs. Why bother adding traces? Ah, good question!  TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show...

Tracing   Instrumentation  

startSpan vs. startActiveSpan

TL;DR: startSpan is easier and measures a duration. Use it if your work won’t create any subspans. startActiveSpan requires that you pass a callback for...

Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry: Who’s There? The Resource.

I’m adding instrumentation code to my app. To set it up, I have to create a Resource. What does that mean? What can I do...

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