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Observability

Enabling Design System Observability Using Honeycomb
March 31, 2025
Grady Salzman

Grady Salzman

Enabling Design System Observability Using Honeycomb

At Honeycomb, we’re actively growing our design system, Lattice, to ensure accessibility, optimize performance, and establish consistent design patterns across our product. One metric we use to measure Lattice is the adoption of components across the product. Adoption is about understanding how, where, and why they’re being used.

Observability
Teams & Collaboration
So, What’s the Difference Between Observability and Monitoring?
March 17, 2025
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

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.

Monitoring
Observability
Why Observability 2.0 Is Such a Gamechanger
February 5, 2025
Erwin van der Koogh

Erwin van der Koogh

Why Observability 2.0 Is Such a Gamechanger

One of the hardest parts of my job is to get people to appreciate just how much of a difference Honeycomb/observability 2.0 is compared to their current way of working. It’s not just a small step up or a linear improvement. Rather, it’s an entire step change in the way that you write, deploy, and operate software for your customers.

Observability
2024 Wrapped: Observability Retrospective
December 18, 2024
Rox Williams

Rox Williams

2024 Wrapped: 6 Key Observability Trends

Another one in the history books: 2024 is (almost!) over. The OpenObservability Talks podcast, hosted by Dotan Horovits, recently featured a lively discussion with Charity Majors, Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb, to reflect on the trends, achievements, and future of observability.

Observability
Measure What Matters
December 16, 2024
Jamie Danielson

Jamie Danielson

Measure What Matters

Have you ever had an alert go off that you immediately ignore? It’s a nuisance alert—not actionable—but you keep it around just in case. Or maybe you’ve looked at a trace waterfall and wondered what exactly happened during a gap that just doesn’t drill down deep enough to explain what’s going on. Do you know the feeling where you have just enough information to monitor what’s going on in your systems, but not quite enough to put your mind at ease?

Conferences & Meetups
Observability
Observability in the Age of AI
December 11, 2024
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

Observability in the Age of AI

Honeycomb engineers were amongst the earliest adopters of this technology. Not in the widely parodied top-down, VP-mandated, “go be AI leaders nao plz” kind of way, but in a bottoms-up, experimental kind of way, driven by curiosity and fascination.

AI & LLMs
Observability
Understanding Develocity Build Data with Honeycomb
December 9, 2024
David Chang

David Chang

Understanding Develocity Build Data with Honeycomb

Develocity, formerly known as Gradle Enterprise, is a powerful tool that speeds up local and CI build time, helps troubleshoot your builds, and analyzes your data. At Pinterest, we have a dedicated team, Mobile Builds, and we ensure that developers can build fast and often. This enables developers to be more productive by getting faster feedback on their code.

Observability
Beyond Monitoring: A Guide to Cloud Observability
November 22, 2024
Rox Williams

Rox Williams

Beyond Monitoring: A Guide to Cloud Observability

With more and often smaller processes, cloud-native architectures have driven the need for better insights into our software—a way to look into how these processes fit together. To accomplish this insight, we use an approach that goes beyond traditional monitoring and provides deep insights into system behavior. This approach is cloud observability.

Observability
OpenTelemetry
There Is Only One Key Difference Between Observability 1.0 and 2.0
November 19, 2024
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

There Is Only One Key Difference Between Observability 1.0 and 2.0

We’ve been talking about observability 2.0 a lot lately; what it means for telemetry and instrumentation, its practices and sociotechnical implications, and the dramatically different shape of its cost model. With all of these details swimming about, I’m afraid we’re already starting to lose sight of what matters. The distinction between observability 1.0 and observability 2.0 is not a laundry list, it’s not marketing speak, and it’s not that complicated or hard to understand. The distinction is a technical one, and it’s actually quite simple.

Observability
How to Get Infinite Custom Metrics For Free
October 3, 2024
Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

How to Get Infinite Custom Metrics For Free

Oh no, I’m getting out-of-memory errors! How much memory is my app using? To find out, we go look for a metric that tells us how much memory is available, and we graph it around the time that our errors occurred.

Metrics
Observability
Refinery and EMA Sampling
October 1, 2024
Kent Quirk

Kent Quirk

Refinery and EMA Sampling

Refinery is Honeycomb’s sampling proxy, which our largest customers use to improve the value they get from their telemetry. It has a variety of interesting samplers to choose from. One category of these is called dynamic sampling. It’s basically a technique for adjusting sample rates to account for the volume of incoming data—but doing so in a way that rare events get more priority than common events.

Observability
Sampling
An Ode to Events
September 17, 2024
Nick Travaglini

Nick Travaglini

An Ode to Events

At this point, it’s almost passé to write a blog post comparing events to the three pillars. Nobody really wants to give up their position. Regardless, I’m going to talk about how great events are and use some analogies to try to get that across. Maybe these will help folks learn to really appreciate them and to depreciate a certain understanding of the three pillars. Or maybe not.

Observability
Is it Time to Version Observability? Signs Point to Yes
September 9, 2024
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

It’s Time to Version Observability: Introducing Observability 2.0

In 2016, we at Honeycomb first borrowed the term “observability” from the wikipedia entry for control systems observability, where it is a measure of your ability to understand internal system states just by observing its outputs. We then spent a couple of years trying to work out how that definition might apply to software systems. Many twitter threads, podcasts, blog posts, and lengthy laundry lists of technical criteria emerged from that work, including a whole ass book.

Observability
The Evolution of Engineering and the Role of Observability 2.0 in Shaping the Future
September 5, 2024
Brian Chang

Brian Chang

The Evolution of Engineering and the Role of Observability 2.0 in Shaping the Future

Engineering has come a long way since the days of delivering discrete, point-in-time products that were often packaged on a CD and shipped to customers. The days of physical media and long development cycles are long gone. The advent of cloud computing and the rise of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) transformed the landscape, creating a new model of continuous development and service delivery. This shift has not only revolutionized how software is developed, but has also redefined the engineer’s role.

Observability
Software Engineering
What Is Full-Stack Observability?
August 22, 2024
Rox Williams

Rox Williams

What Is Full-Stack Observability?

Simply put, full-stack observability is monitoring designed for modern, cloud-native architectures. It allows you to understand how your software system interacts at scale, across everything from traditional mainframes and legacy clients to modern serverless or Kubernetes-based services.

Observability
Apdex in Honeycomb
August 5, 2024
Max Aguirre

Max Aguirre

Apdex in Honeycomb

“How is my app performing?” is one of the most common, yet hardest questions to answer. There are myriad ways to measure this, like error rate, average response time, and so on. Enter the Application Performance Index (aka Apdex), a single metric that attempts to answer, “Are my application’s users happy?”

Observability
Software Engineering
Navigating Software Engineering Complexity With Observability
June 27, 2024
Rox Williams

Rox Williams

Navigating Software Engineering Complexity With Observability

In the not-too-distant past, building software was relatively straightforward. The simplicity of LAMP stacks, Rails, and other well-defined web frameworks provided a stable foundation. Issues were isolated, systems failed in predictable ways, and engineers had time to innovate on new features for the business. And it was good.

Observability
Software Engineering
Framework for an Observability Maturity Model
June 14, 2024
Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones

Framework for an Observability Maturity Model: Using Observability to Advance Your Engineering & Product

Everyone’s talking about “observability,” but many don’t know what it is, what it’s for, or what benefits it offers. With this framing of observability in terms of goals instead of tools, we hope teams will have better language for improving what their organization delivers and how they deliver it.

Observability
Software Engineering
Announcing Honeycomb Support Business Hours in Europe
May 17, 2024
Jessica Nunn

Jessica Nunn

Announcing Honeycomb Support Business Hours in Europe

Earlier this year, Honeycomb announced the launch of data residency in Europe. To meet the growing needs of our customers in the region, we are delighted to announce new Honeycomb Support business hours.

News & Announcements
Observability
The Cost Crisis in Metrics Tooling: Whitepaper Excerpt
May 13, 2024
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

The Cost Crisis in Metrics Tooling

In my February 2024 piece The Cost Crisis in Observability Tooling, I explained why the cost of tools built atop the three pillars of metrics, logs, and traces—observability 1.0 tooling—is not only soaring at a rate many times higher than your traffic increases, but has also become radically disconnected from the value those tools can deliver. Too often, as costs go up, the value you derive from these tools declines.

Metrics
Observability