Feature Focus: August 2022
By Nick Rycar | Last modified on September 2, 2022Itâs already September! Time flies by when youâre getting things done, and weâve been a busy bunch of bees here at Honeycomb. đ
Weâre excited that weâve gotten to share some of those changes with you already, like our relaunched interactive sandbox and the beta release of our OpenTelemetry log support and Go distribution, but thatâs just the tip of the iceberg.
To keep you in the loop about all the goings on over here, weâre kicking off a regular series where we take you through monthly highlights of whatâs new and noteworthy. A sort of product feature ICYMI, if you will.
Without further ado, hereâs what weâve been up to.
Better filtering capabilities
Being able to quickly query and surface correlationsâeven across hundreds of dimensionsâis a big part of what makes Honeycomb amazing. The only problem with having so much data at your disposal is that sometimes the attributes youâre most interested in are on different pages of pagination or buried down at the bottom of a long list.
Well, we have just the feature for you: filtering!
Weâve added filtering capabilities to the BubbleUp and Raw Data views, allowing you to quickly get to exactly the information you need.
Filtering in BubbleUp
BubbleUp lets you take a query visualization, select a portion of the result, and compare dimensions in your selection against a baseline sample, showing those with the highest deviations first. When you log in, youâll notice a new text bar above the dimensions summary where you can filter the results to a user-defined subset. This can be particularly helpful if the dimensions youâd like to compare are paginated onto different pages, making them difficult to see side by side. See the example below, where weâre showing only dimensions that contain the string user
:

Filtering with Raw Data
Weâve added a similar capability to the Raw Data tab. When you navigate to the Raw Data tab after running a query, all of its relevant dimensions become columns in this aggregated view. With large datasets, this can be difficult to parse, so Honeycomb provides a list of dimensions along the left-hand side of the screen where you can select which fields youâd like to display. This list can get quite long, so as with BubbleUp, weâve added a text field you can use to filter for just the fields you want, without needing to scroll through a long list.

Experimental derived column editor
Derived columns can be incredibly powerful. They allow you to add insights to your telemetry data without needing to add any new instrumentation. If a data point can be derived from the data youâre already collecting, you can create a brand new column in the dataset to capture it automatically (and retroactively apply it to all existing events).
This could be anything fromâŚ
âŚa simple math calculation: âI can get a custom duration by subtracting these two timestamps.â
âŚto a complex service level indicator: âOkay, if a request touched my âproductsâ service, did not result in an error, but took longer than 1000ms to complete, my customer experience might be degrading.â
The only problem is that historically, youâve had to write these functions in a single-line text bar, which makes anything beyond the simplest of use cases difficult to parse and troubleshoot.

With that in mind, weâve been hard at work on an updated user experience with some of the quality of life improvements that have become invaluable in many of our IDE tools. Whatâs more, you can try it out right now.
When you create or edit a derived column in the web UI, there is now a slider in the top right corner letting you toggle on the new experience and enjoy the comfort of a multiline editor, syntax highlighting, function and column autocomplete, error explanations on hover, and more!

Be sure to let us know about your experience with the new editor by joining us at #ux-feedback in our Pollinators Slack, or by filling out this user experience survey.
New copy button in Honeycomb docs
I love a good easy button, and I love copying and pasting code snippets from docs. So, itâs no surprise that I absolutely love an easy button for copy/pasting code snippets from docs. And now, we have one!
This oneâs pretty self-explanatory. Wanna snag a code block? No need to click and drag, just look to the top right corner. No fuss, no muss.

Wrapping it Up
Thatâs it for the highlights, but you can always find a full list of updates weâve made to Honeycomb in our changelog. We also post changelog entries to the #general channel of the Pollinators Slack and to our Twitter account under the #changelog hashtag.
See you next month!
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