Getting At The Good Stuff: How To Sample Traces in Honeycomb
(This is the first post by our new head of Customer Success, Irving.) Sampling is a must for applications at scale; it’s a technique for reducing the burden on your infrastructure and telemetry systems…
Instrumenting Lambda with Traces: A Complete Example in Python
We’re big fans of AWS Lambda at Honeycomb. As you may have read, we recently made some major improvements to our storage engine by leveraging Lambda to process more data in less time. Making…
Honeycomb SLO Now Generally Available: Success, Defined.
Honeycomb now offers SLOs, aka Service Level Objectives. This is the second in a set of of essays on creating SLOs from first principles. Previously, in this series, we created a derived column to…
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…
From “Secondary Storage” To Just “Storage”: A Tale of Lambdas, LZ4, and Garbage Collection
When we introduced Secondary Storage two years ago, it was a deliberate compromise between economy and performance. Compared to Honeycomb’s primary NVMe storage attached to dedicated servers, secondary storage let customers keep more data…
Why I’m Grateful For Our Observability Community
It’s that season, when we take time to consider what we’re grateful for and extend thanks to those we value and the experiences we treasure. One special aspect of America’s Thanksgiving holiday is the…
Incident Report: Running Dry on Memory Without Noticing
On November 6, 2019, we intermittently rejected 1-3% of customer telemetry data at ingest for four periods of 20 minutes each. The trigger of the incident was a slow memory leak that manifested over…
The Hive at Monitorama Baltimore 2019
As a human who entered this space via marketing, I often turn to my teammates for context. I recently asked the hive, why do we like Monitorama so much? Briefly: well curated community-driven event…
OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, OpenCensus: An Introduction and Glossary
There’s been a fair bit of buzz lately about OpenTelemetry, which is the next major version of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. The leadership of those two projects have come together to create OpenTelemetry,…