Honeycomb Blog
Use New Range Markers to Show The Duration of a State Change
In our world of distributed systems, state changes to your infrastructure often take some time to propagate. With a few exceptions (for example, feature flags), single point in time changes are rare. Deploys, outages, database migrations, failovers, stress tests; none of these things are instantaneous – all have some duration during which the system is changing. When laying down a Marker on your graph to indicate the state change, it’s useful to not only see the start time but visualize the entire duration overlaying your regular traffic. The old way wasn’t enough We’ve always noted both the start and end…
o11ycon: A Conference For The Observability Community
Hey friends, We recently announced o11ycon, and the response has been terrific! Especially since we haven’t really even told you all what we’re planning. 🙂 First things first: o11y means observability. (Yes, abbreviations are annoying, but YOU try typing ‘observability’ twenty times a day with character limits. And o11y just sounds so cute!) o11ycon will be a one day, single-track, participatory event, bringing together forward-thinking engineers and leaders from every type and stage and size of company, to answer two significant questions: what is observability, and how do we, as a community, do it? What is observability? What does it…
How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 9: Tracing The Query Path
This post continues our long-running dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb Part 8: A Bee’s Life. To understand how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb at a high level, check out our dogfooding blog posts first — they do a great job of telling the story of problems we’ve solved with Honeycomb. Last week we announced the general availability of tracing in Honeycomb. We’ve been dogfooding this feature extensively as part of an ongoing effort to keep Honeycomb fast and reliable. In this post, we’ll discuss how we use tracing internally, some of the ways it’s helped us improve our service, and some of the…
Instrument Your Ruby App In Minutes with the Honeycomb Beeline for Ruby
You’ve always been able to get observability for your Ruby apps by instrumenting them with our SDK, affectionately known as libhoney, but we know instrumenting code you’ve already written is nobody’s favourite job. If only there were some way to automate the repetitive parts, so you could get instant insight into what your app is doing in production, and then focus your effort on augmenting that insight with the information that’s unique to your app! Meet the Honeycomb Beeline for Ruby. Like our Beelines for Go and Node, it understands the common packages you’re using and automatically instruments them to send useful events to…
Get deeper insights with Honeycomb Tracing
We’re excited to introduce Honeycomb Tracing! Now, you can both: Visualize individual traces to deeply understand request execution, and Break down, filter, and aggregate trace data to uncover patterns, find outliers, and understand historical trends. Tracing makes it easier to understand control flow within a distributed system. Waterfall diagrams concisely capture the execution history of individual requests, making it easy to answer questions such as: What does the high-level structure of the code look like? Which methods are especially slow? Are we making too many calls to a particular service? Are things happening serially when they could be parallelized? Is…
Honeycomb goes Serverless: Send your app data without running agents
Serverless apps are growing in popularity, thanks to tools like AWS API Gateway and Lambda, and a growing number of powerful frameworks that simplify development and deployment. Complex applications are still complex, however, and regardless of your platform you’ll still need to think about observability. Today, we’re excited to announce our Agentless Integrations for AWS. There are a lot of ways to get data into honeycomb. Most of these – such as honeytail, our HoneyAWS suite, or the Kubernetes agent – require you to run an agent somewhere in your infrastructure. Our agentless integrations are different: they hook into the…
Build and Run a Honeycomb Query right from your URL bar with Query Template Links
Whenever you run a Honeycomb query, you’re directed to the permalink for the results. Returning to this URL always supplies the same data without re-running the query, which is important when sharing links to make sure that everybody is looking at the same thing. However, there may be cases where you want a link not to a specific set of results, but to a set of query parameters which are re-run automatically. Further, you may want to generate these links without relying on the Honeycomb UI. Introducing Query Template Links Query Template Links allow you to define a Honeycomb query…
Support for AWS Application Load Balancer in the Honeycomb AWS Bundle
When we announced support for ingesting AWS Elastic Load Balancer access logs to Honeycomb, one of the first follow-up requests was for us to add support for AWS Application Load Balancer as well (which, alongside the Network Load Balancer, represents ELBv2). Given the list of features that ALB supports, it’s not difficult to see why. Who doesn’t want microservice-friendly path routing, native HTTP/2 support, tight integration with Amazon’s container-related services, and more? Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve released support for ingesting such ALB logs. Based on work originally submitted by Jonathan Reichhold, community member Pavan Ravipati carried the pull request most of the…
Instrument Your Go App In Minutes with the Honeycomb Beeline for Go
Want magical per-request instrumentation to roll effortlessly out of your Go app without even looking like you’re trying? Meet the Honeycomb Beeline for Go! Beelines automatically construct and emit useful events for common components of your application, such as HTTP handlers and SQL connections. You can now instrument these components in just a few lines of code, and the Beeline will automagically send Honeycomb everything you need to quickly start visualizing complex questions, like “what’s the 99th percentile latency of each endpoint?” or “what endpoints are being hit most often?” And if you want to slice and dice additional app context, you can add a custom event…
Observability into Bare Metal Provisioning with RackN
This guest blog post is from Rob Hirschfeld, Co-founder and CEO at RackN. At RackN, a core design principle is that operations should be easy to track and troubleshoot. We work hard to automate provisioning with observable processes because insight into complex interactions within a modern data center is critical for success. So, it’s not helpful if we require complex technologies to understand where issues arise from disconnected processes. RackN and the open source Digital Rebar community require a simple, best in class solution to provide a better way to observe provisioning operations within our system without adding complexity and overhead. Making…