Martin Thwaites
Principal Developer Advocate
Martin is a Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, o11y enthusiast, and a delivery-focused Developer from the UK. With over 20 years experience in development in the .NET ecosystem, he’s worked with many companies on scaling up engineering teams and products. The past few years have been spent working on solving complex problems with some of the UK’s big names, including e-commerce retailers and credit lenders.
Building a Simple Synthetic Monitor With OpenTelemetry
In this post, I’ll cover what synthetic monitoring is and show an example of how you can create a simple monitor using OpenTelemetry, .NET, and...
Observability: It's Every Engineer’s Job, Not Just Ops’ Problem
Observability is way more about software engineering than it is about operations. Operators are users of observability data for monitoring and alerting on systems. They’ll...
So, What’s the Difference Between Observability and Monitoring?
Observability and monitoring are not about gathering different data—they differ in their purpose, but share the same data....
Stop Logging the Request Body!
With more and more people adopting OpenTelemetry and specifically using the tracing signal, I’ve seen an uptick in people wanting to add the entire request...
Monitoring Windows Servers With the OpenTelemetry Collector
The OpenTelemetry Collector is an exceptional solution for proxying and enhancing telemetry, but it’s also great for generating telemetry from machines too. In this post,...
Ingesting JSON Logs From Containers With the OpenTelemetry Collector
So, how do we get JSON logs into a backend analysis system like Honeycomb that primarily accepts OTLP data? In this post, we’ll cover how...
Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector to AKS
The Collector is the focal point for telemetry inside your cluster. Instead of your containerized applications sending directly to your OpenTelemetry-capable backend (the place that...
OpenTelemetry Best Practices #3: Data Prep and Cleansing
Having telemetry is all well and good—amazing, in fact. It’s easy to do: add some OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation libraries to your stack and they’ll fill your...
OpenTelemetry Best Practices #2: Agents, Sidecars, Collectors, Coded Instrumentation
For years, we’ve been installing what vendors have referred to as “agents” that reach into our applications and pull out useful telemetry information from them....
OpenTelemetry Best Practices #1: Naming
Naming things, and specifically consistently naming things, is still one of the most useful pieces of work you can do in telemetry. It’s often overlooked...
Building a Secure OpenTelemetry Collector
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a core part of telemetry pipelines, which makes it one of the parts of your infrastructure that must be as secure...
How to Avoid Paying for Honeycomb
You probably know that we have a generous free plan that allows you to send 20 million events per month. This is enough for many...
What Happens to DevOps when the Kubernetes Adrenaline Rush Ends?
Kubernetes has been around for nearly 10 years now. In the past five years, we’ve seen a drastic increase in adoption by engineering teams of...
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...
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...