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Building a Secure OpenTelemetry Collector
January 9, 2024
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Building a Secure OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a core part of telemetry pipelines, which makes it one of the parts of your infrastructure that must be as secure as possible. The general advice from the OpenTelemetry teams is to build a custom Collector executable instead of using the supplied ones when you’re using it in a production scenario. However, that isn’t an easy task, and that prompted me to build something.

OpenTelemetry
Escaping the Cost/Visibility Tradeoff in Observability Platforms
January 5, 2024
Fahim Zaman

Fahim Zaman

Escaping the Cost/Visibility Tradeoff in Observability Platforms

For developers, understanding the performance of shipped code is crucial. Through the last decade, a tablestake function in software monitoring and observability solutions has been to save and track app metrics. Engineers love tools that get out of your way and just work, and the appeal of today’s best-in-class application performance monitoring (APM) suites lies in a seamless day zero experience with drop-in agent installs, button click integrations, and immediate metrics collection. However, the success of no-hassle metrics comes with a caveat—the internet is replete with examples of premiere application monitoring costs spiraling beyond expectations.

Observability
Product Managing to Prevent Burnout
January 3, 2024
Winston Hearn

Winston Hearn

Product Managing to Prevent Burnout

I’ve been thinking about a risk that—if I’m not careful—could severely hinder my team’s ability to ship on time, celebrate success, and continue work after launch: burnout. I don’t see burnout mentioned often when the work of product management is discussed, but I believe it should be taken much more seriously.

Software Engineering
Teams & Collaboration
Ship First, Model Later: A Short Recap of AI.Dev
December 21, 2023
Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)

Ship First, Model Later: A Short Recap of AI.Dev

In a keynote at AI.Dev, Robert Nishihara (CEO, Anyscale) described the shift: A year ago, the people working with ML models were ML experts. Now, they’re developers. A year ago, the process was to experiment with building a model, then put a product on top of it. Now, it’s ship a product, find the market fit, then create customized models.

Conferences & Meetups
Introducing Honeycomb’s Microsoft Teams Integration for Enhanced Alert Management
December 15, 2023
Natalie Friedman

Natalie Friedman

Introducing Honeycomb’s Microsoft Teams Integration for Enhanced Alert Management

Today marks an exciting milestone at Honeycomb, and we’re thrilled to share it with you. We officially launched our integration with Microsoft Teams, a step forward in our continuous effort to streamline and enhance your observability experience. Teams now joins our growing list of over 100 Honeycomb integrations.

Connectors & Integrations
Product Updates
Action Recommended: OpenTelemetry HTTP Attributes Breaking Changes
December 12, 2023
Phillip Carter

Phillip Carter

Action Recommended: OpenTelemetry HTTP Attributes Breaking Changes

Earlier this year, the folks working on OpenTelemetry launched an effort to stabilize HTTP Semantic Conventions. In November 2023, OpenTelemetry announced that HTTP Semantic Conventions were stable. They accomplished this by merging the existing HTTP Semantic Conventions with the Elastic Common Schema HTTP attribute conventions.

OpenTelemetry
AI’s Impact on Cloud-Native at KubeCon 2023
December 6, 2023
Austin Parker

Austin Parker

AI’s Impact on Cloud-Native at KubeCon 2023

Cloud-native developers and practitioners gathered from around the world to learn, collaborate, and network at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon North America 2023 between November 6th and 9th at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL—myself included. This wasn’t my first time attending—I’ve been coming to KubeCon since 2016—but it was easily one of the most exciting experiences I’ve had as part of the cloud-native community.

Conferences & Meetups
Kubecon 2023
December 4, 2023
Jamie Danielson

Jamie Danielson

KubeCon NA 2023: What a Conference!

Now that we’ve had time to decompress from Kubecon, we wanted to do a writeup about our collective experience. Six of us spoke at the conference and Charity participated in a panel, so we included short talk recaps.

Conferences & Meetups
Culture
A Practical Guide to Debugging Browser Performance With OpenTelemetry
December 1, 2023
Purvi Kanal

Purvi Kanal

A Practical Guide to Debugging Browser Performance With OpenTelemetry

So you’ve taken a look at the core web vitals for your site and… it’s not looking good. You’re overwhelmed, and you don’t know what change to make because everything seems like too big of a project to make a real difference. There are so many measurements to keep track of and the standards cited seem even scarier. This is extremely normal. Web performance standards can feel impossible to meet for a lot of us.

Debugging
Frontend
OpenTelemetry
Observability Is About Confidence
November 29, 2023
Jamie Danielson

Jamie Danielson

Observability Is About Confidence

Observability is important to understand what’s happening in production. But carving out the time to add instrumentation to a codebase is daunting, and often treated as a separate task to writing features. This means that we end up instrumenting for observability long after a feature has shipped, usually when there’s a problem with it and we’ve lost all context. What if we instead treated observability similarly to how we treat tests? We don’t submit code without a test, so let’s do the same with observability: treat it as part of the feature while the code is still fresh in our mind, with the benefit of being able to observe how the feature behaves in production.

Observability
OpenTelemetry
Using Honeycomb for LLM Application Development
November 28, 2023
George Miranda

George Miranda

Using Honeycomb for LLM Application Development

Ever since we launched Query Assistant last June, we’ve learned a lot about working with—and improving—Large Language Models (LLMs) in production with Honeycomb. Today, we’re sharing those techniques so that you can use them to achieve better outputs from your own LLM applications. The techniques in this blog are a new Honeycomb use case. You can use them today. For free. With Honeycomb. If you’re running LLM apps in production (or thinking about it), these approaches should be useful.

AI & LLMs
Defensive Instrumentation Benefits Everyone
November 22, 2023
Mike Terhar

Mike Terhar

Defensive Instrumentation Benefits Everyone

A lot of reasoning in content is predicated on the audience being in a modern, psychologically safe, agile sort of environment. It’s aspirational, so folks who aren’t in those environments may feel like the path there includes doing “the new thing” or using “the new tool.” If you write software and your employer hasn’t caught up to all the newest, best ways to work, I hope this pragmatic post helps you sleep better at night.

Instrumentation
SLOs Get Budget Rate Alerts
November 14, 2023
Fred Hebert

Fred Hebert

From Oops to Ops: SLOs Get Budget Rate Alerts

As someone living the Honeycomb ops life for a while, SLOs have been the bread and butter of our most critical and useful alerting. However, they had severe, long-standing limitations. In this post, I will describe these limitations, and how our brand new feature, budget rate alerts, addresses them.

Product Updates
Service Level Objectives
What Do Developers Need to Know About Kubernetes, Anyway?
November 10, 2023
Austin Parker

Austin Parker

What Do Developers Need to Know About Kubernetes, Anyway?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: you just pushed and deployed your latest change to production, and it’s rolling out to your Kubernetes cluster. You sip your coffee as you wrap up some documentation when a ping in the ops channel catches your eye—a sales engineer is complaining that the demo environment is slow. Probably nothing to worry about, not like your changes had anything to do with that… but, minutes later, more alerts start to fire off.

Software Engineering
Simplify OpenTelemetry Pipelines with Headers Setter
November 8, 2023
Mike Terhar

Mike Terhar

Simplify OpenTelemetry Pipelines with Headers Setter

In telemetry jargon, a pipeline is a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of nodes that carry emitted signals from an application to a backend. In an OpenTelemetry Collector, a pipeline is a set of receivers that collect signals, runs them through processors, and then emits them through configured exporters. This blog post hopes to simplify both types of pipelines by using an OpenTelemetry extension called the Headers Setter.

OpenTelemetry
Introducing Honeycomb for Kubernetes: Bridging the Divide Between Applications and Infrastructure
November 1, 2023
Natalie Friedman

Natalie Friedman

Introducing Honeycomb for Kubernetes: Bridging the Divide Between Applications and Infrastructure

In our continuous journey to support teams grappling with the complexities of Kubernetes environments, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of Honeycomb for Kubernetes, a dedicated solution designed to bridge the growing divide between infrastructure/platform teams and application developers. This is available to all plans (including Free!) at no additional cost.

Product Updates
How to Avoid Paying for Honeycomb
October 30, 2023
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

How to Avoid Paying for Honeycomb

You probably know that we have a generous free plan that allows you to send 20 million events per month. This is enough for many of our customers. In fact, some have developed neat techniques to keep themselves underneath the event limit. I’m going to share one way here—hopefully no one at Honeycomb notices!

Sampling
Effortless Engineering: Quick Tips for Crafting Prompts
October 26, 2023
Michael Sickles

Michael Sickles

Effortless Engineering: Quick Tips for Crafting Prompts

Large Language Models (LLMs) are all the rage in software development, and for good reason: they provide crucial opportunities to positively enhance our software. At Honeycomb, we saw an opportunity in the form of Query Assistant, a feature that can help engineers ask questions of their systems in plain English. But we certainly encountered issues while building it—issues you’ll most likely face too if you’re building a product with LLMs—with the main one being, how do we get the model to return data in a way that works with our softwa

AI & LLMs
OpenTelemetry For Humans
October 16, 2023
Austin Parker

Austin Parker

OpenTelemetry For Humans

Who is software for? It’s an interesting question, because there’s an obvious answer. It’s for the users, right? If your job is to write software, then it’s implied that the most important thing you should care about is the experience people have when they use your software. I think this is a bit of an over-simplification, though. Yes, we build software for our users, but we also build it for ourselves. At some level, I believe all developers are in it for themselves. They like to see the thinking rock respond to the commands they give it. There’s a level of intellectual curiosity that grips many of us when we write software, the quiet joy of getting one over on this unfeeling collection of silicon and cobalt, bending it to our will and mastering its arcane language.

News & Announcements
OpenTelemetry
What Happens to DevOps when the Kubernetes Adrenaline Rush Ends?
October 12, 2023
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

What Happens to DevOps when the Kubernetes Adrenaline Rush Ends?

Kubernetes has been around for nearly 10 years now. In the past five years, we’ve seen a drastic increase in adoption by engineering teams of all sizes. The promise of standardization of deployments and scaling across different types of applications, from static websites to full-blown microservice solutions, has fueled this sharp increase.

Software Engineering