Meet the Author
Kent Quirk
Staff Software Engineer
Kent has nearly 40 years of software engineering experience, from low-level device drivers to large scale consumer platforms. He uses his training in user interaction design and experience as a computer game entrepreneur to bring a real customer focus to software architecture.
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Refinery and EMA Sampling
Refinery is Honeycomb’s sampling proxy, which our largest customers use to improve the value they get from their telemetry. It has a variety of interesting samplers to choose from. One category of these is called dynamic sampling. It’s basically a technique for adjusting sample rates to account for the volume of incoming data—but doing so in a way that rare events get more priority than common events.
The Evolution of Sampling in Honeycomb: Introducing Refinery 2.0
It’s rare to have too much telemetry—it’s not often that someone says “I wish I didn’t have all this information!” However, telemetry is data, and data is not necessarily information—particularly when you’re drowning in it. Honeycomb’s query engine is so fast and powerful that many customers can send us all their telemetry. As we say on our stickers, “The Backend Can Handle It.”