Blog

Posts by Martin Thwaites

OpenTelemetry  

Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector to Kubernetes with Helm

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a useful application to have in your stack. However, deploying it has always felt a little time consuming: working out how...

Tracing  

Trace Propagation and Public API Endpoints in .NET: Part 1 (Disable All)

One of the issues with the W3C trace context is that it doesn’t define any standards for how far a trace is to propagate. If...

Observability  

Don’t Let Observability Inflate Your Cloud Costs 

We saw a shift this year in how the technology sector honed in on sustainability from a cost perspective. In particular, looking at where they’re...

Tracing   Metrics   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: To Metric or to Trace?

Dear Miss O11y, I remember reading quite interesting opinions from you about usage of metrics and traces in an application. Did you elaborate on those...

OpenTelemetry  

Does OpenTelemetry in .NET Cause Performance Degradation?

Contrary to Betteridge’s Law of Tabloid Headlines, the answer to the question, "does OpenTelemetry in .NET cause performance degradation?" is yes, but context is important. I...

Logging  

Twelve-Factor Apps and Modern Observability

The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a go-to guide for people building microservices. In its time, it presented a step change in how we think about...

Observability   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: Is There a Beginner’s Guide On How to Add Observability to Your Applications?

Dear Miss O11y, I want to make my microservices more observable. Currently, I only have logs. I’ll add metrics soon, but I’m not really sure...

Tracing  

Understanding Distributed Tracing with a Message Bus

So you're used to debugging systems using a distributed trace, but your system is about to introduce a message queue—and that will work the same…...

OpenTelemetry   Observability  

Monitoring Cloud Database Costs with OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb

In the last few years, the usage of databases that charge by request, query, or insert—rather than by provisioned compute infrastructure (e.g., CPU, RAM, etc.)—has...

Observability   Ask Miss O11y  

How Do I Do Availability Checks in Honeycomb?

Let’s dig into what we mean by an Availability Check and how that maps to observability, tracing, and supporting production systems....

OpenTelemetry  

Running the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps

In this post, we’ll look at how to host the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps. There are a few gotchas with how it’s deployed,...

OpenTelemetry   Monitoring  

Monitoring Unit Tests with OpenTelemetry in .NET

In this post, we’ll look at how you can use OpenTelemetry to monitor your unit tests and send that data to Honeycomb to visualize. It’s...

Observability   Featured  

Authors' Cut—Not-So-Distant Early Warning: Making the Move to Observability-Driven Development

Observability is about understanding systems, which means more than just production. Moving from logs to tracing and showing causality can be done locally, as well....

OpenTelemetry   Observability  

Adding Code Tags to Your OpenTelemetry Spans

One of the reasons that OpenTelemetry is great at doing this is that a lot of the common attributes you may find on a span...

Instrumentation   Ask Miss O11y  

Ask Miss O11y: My Manager Won't Let Me Spend Any Time Instrumenting My Code

In the same way as the business is likely ok with you writing developer-based tests (unit, automation, integration), instrumentation is the same. The conversation we...

1 2