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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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…...
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...
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....
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,...
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...
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....
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...
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...
Ingesting HTTP Access Logs from AppService
Debugging application performance in Azure AppService is something that’s quite difficult using Azure’s built-in services (like Application Insights). Among some of the issues are visualizations,...
What the Hell is Activity Anyway?
Dear Miss O11y, I use .NET and I keep seeing something called `Activity` but in OpenTelemetry there is only talk about “Span” and “Trace,” why?...