Observability

March 22, 2018

Observability: A Manifesto

Everybody and their freaking grandpa is now claiming to do observability, not stodgy old monitoring. Fine, great. Nice to be trendy I guess. But are they? What’s the difference? You all know how I…

Observability

Software Engineering

March 15, 2018

Travis Redman

Resolving High CPU Usage in Kubernetes With Honeycomb

At Honeycomb, we’re excited about Kubernetes. In fact, we’re in the early stages of moving some of our services to k8s. Tools like kops have made getting started with k8s easier than ever. But…

March 8, 2018

The New Best Engineer

If you make a habit of reading twitter or the writings of various thought lords and ladies of the internet, you’ve probably heard a lot of advice on what software engineers should do, like:…

Observability

Software Engineering

February 22, 2018

Andy Isaacson

Security Through Observability

Observability is great for understanding the ramifications of your system. In brief, massively distributed application stacks demand more sophisticated tools than traditional metrics/monitoring, because engineers must be able to ask new questions and get…

Observability

Security

January 25, 2018

Guest Blogger

How to Use NLog for Structured Logging

We’re grateful for this guest post from Tim Wilde! You can find the source code for the examples he uses in his github repo. Strings are where data go to die There you go;…

November 14, 2017

Best Practices for Observability

Observability has been getting a lot of attention recently. What started out as a fairly obscure technical term, dragged from the dusty annals of control theory, has been generating attention for one simple reason:…

October 24, 2017

Metrics: not the observability droids you’re looking for

I went to Monitorama last year for my first time. It was great; I had a terrific time. But I couldn’t help but notice how speaker after speaker in talk after talk spent time…

Metrics

Observability

August 31, 2017

Nathan LeClaire

Using the Golang Pprof Web UI to Debug Memory Usage

Golang as an Observability Tool Go, for good reason, has become an incredibly popular language for everything from web applications to DevOps tools. We lean on Golang heavily here at Honeycomb, and naturally we…

Connectors & Integrations

Observability

Product Updates

August 22, 2017

Charity Majors

Observability: What’s in a Name?

“Is observability just monitoring with another name?” “Observability: we changed the word because developers don’t like monitoring.” There’s been a lot of hilarious snark about this lately. Which is great, who doesn’t love A+…

January 6, 2017

The Problem with Pre-aggregated Metrics: Part 3, the “metrics”

This is the third of three posts focusing on the limitations of pre-aggregated metrics. The first one explained how, by pre-aggregating, you’re tightly constrained when trying to explore data or debug problems; the second…

Metrics

Observability

Showing how a specific metric is incremented

December 13, 2016

Christine Yen

The Problem with Pre-aggregated Metrics: Part 2, the “aggregated”

This is the second of three posts focusing on the limitations of pre-aggregated metrics. The first one explained how, by pre-aggregating, your flexibility is tightly constrained when trying to explore data or debug problems….

Metrics

Observability

December 7, 2016

Christine Yen

The Problem with Pre-aggregated Metrics: Part 1, the “Pre”

This is the first of three posts focusing on the limitations of pre-aggregated metrics, each corresponding to one of the “pre”, “aggregated”, and “metrics” parts of the phrase. The second can be found here….

Metrics

Observability

October 8, 2016

Charity Majors

Honeycomb and the Five Whys: Summary Post

Anchor post at the top of this week’s long series of “vision” posts, so everything doesn’t just appear backwards. 🙂 This week we set forth the case for why Honeycomb is the future. We’ve…

Observability

October 6, 2016

Charity Majors

Part 5/5: Building Badass Engineers and Badass Teams

No matter how much we love technology, it is always a means to an end. The mission comes first – we don’t do tech for its own sake, we use tech to get the…

Observability

October 6, 2016

Charity Majors

Part 4/5: Everyone is a DBA

DBAs may be the last remaining priesthood in our industry. But software engineers and operations engineers are increasingly finding themselves responsible for precious company data, and DBAs are increasingly adopting generalist skillsets and best…

October 5, 2016

Part 2/5: Dear Software Engineers

Observability is not a thing for operations or some other team to care about. Software engineers, you are increasingly the primary owners of your own services … and this is a great thing. Developers,…

Observability

Software Engineering

October 5, 2016

Charity Majors

Part 1/5: Asking Better Questions

Any mature production system is likely to have hundreds of thousands if not millions of metrics, most of which never get looked at by a human. Metrics and logs are no longer human-scale, they…

Observability

blog-Why Honeycomb_ Black Swans-SOCIAL (1)

October 4, 2016

Charity Majors

Why Honeycomb? Black Swans, Unknown-Unknowns, and the Glorious Future of Doom

Hello friends! We need to talk – about Honeycomb, you, and the future. We’ve built this thing to help ourselves and one another deal with the future of software. It isn’t Yet Another Monitoring…

Connectors & Integrations

Observability