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2019: The Year Bee-hind Us

Once again we are at the end of another year, facing into the endless potential of the next one, and thinking back on the fun and hard work behind us. Join me now in…

How To Make Your Customers Happy, with Eaze

“Success is a catastrophe that you have to survive.” — CJ Silverio A couple of weeks ago I had the great pleasure of hosting CJ Silverio, Principal Engineer, and Ben Gardella, Manger of Infrastructure…

The Path from Unstructured Logs to Observability

Are you starting out on your journey toward observability? Do you have a mandate from management, or are you a lone warrior in the matrix? From your starting point, how will you make the…

Notes from Observability Roundtables

The Velocity conference happened recently, and as part of it we (Honeycomb) hosted a sort of reverse-panel discussion, where you talked, and we listened. You may be aware that we’re in the process of…

Building Your Observability Practice with Tools that Co-exist

A lot of product marketing is about telling people to throw away what they have in favor of something entirely new. Sometimes that is the right answer–sometimes what you have has completely outlived its…

Toward a Maturity Model for Observability

Access to observability is becoming critical to organizations shipping software, running modern infrastructures in production, and to understanding how users are experiencing their service. To achieve success in delivering a complex service, it’s no…

The New Rules of Sampling

One of the most common questions we get at Honeycomb is about how to control costs while still achieving the level of observability needed to debug, troubleshoot, and understand what is happening in production….

When In Doubt, Add More Spans: A Tale of Tracing and Testing In Production

Recently, Toshok was telling a story about the kind of thing he talks about a lot—improving the performance of some endpoint or page or other. Obviously, we spend a lot of time thinking about…

Metrics vs Events: A Conversation About Controlling Volume

If I’m used to metrics, how should I think about events in Honeycomb? This question cuts to the heart of how Honeycomb is different from other vendors in the APM and metrics space who…

How To Talk to Your Boss About Honeycomb

At Honeycomb, we’re pretty engineering-focused. We think our product is something every developer can benefit from, and we’re working to build something we would want to (and do!) use every day to make our…

Fastly's Lisa Phillips interviews Honeycomb CEO Charity Majors

Honeycomb vs Elastic Stack: It’s About Priorities

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that although collecting and reviewing metrics and logs is a core part of running a stable and successful service, access to raw events and the ability to…

New Dataset Details and Schema Page Updates in Honeycomb

Happy Tuesday! We’ve got some Honeycomb improvements to share that I hope will make your day sweeter. Isn’t that soothing? Feel free to take a moment and remember to breathe. OK. Ready for some…

Announcing Secondary Storage and the Fast Query Window

We tried pretty hard to resist making this joke, but: Now you can keep your hot data hot and your cool data cool! (How many of you are old enough to remember that commercial?…

Sam Stokes talks about data infrastructure on the Data Engineering Podcast

This past week, Honeycomb engineering manager Sam Stokes was interviewed on the Data Engineering Podcast, and in addition to hearing him talk a little about himself (which as far as I can tell, he…

Honeycombers at Influx Days (a late-ish report)

I finally got a chance to sit down and watch Emily and Christine’s talks from last November’s InfluxDays and right off the bat I have to apologize for not doing this sooner, because I…

Honeycomb Values, 2018

This past week was a big one for us here at the hive–we completed our quarterly review/planning process, and while we were all together we reviewed our company values statements and made some adjustments….

Sharing Honeycomb queries is even better with Boards

Hello Honeycomb users! I’m here to tell you about some updates to a feature some of you may already be using. We’ve renamed playlists to “Boards” to more accurately represent what we think you…

Event Foo: Building Better Events

This post from new Honeycomber Rachel Perkins is the seventh in our series on the how, why, and what of events. An event is a record of something that your system did. A line…