Honeycomb Blog

February 17, 2023

Iterating Our Way Toward a Service Map

For a long time at Honeycomb, we envisioned using the tracing data you send us to generate a service map. If you’re unfamiliar, a service map is a graph-like visualization of your system architecture that shows all of its components and dependencies. We didn’t want it to be a static service map, though—the kind you’d view once before going “huh, neat”—and then never looking at it again. We wanted to build an actually useful, uniquely Honeycomb-y service map that could become an integral part of your team’s observability workflow.

Observability

February 15, 2023

Alyson van Hardenberg

My Time As An Employee Board Member (The Weirdest Skip-Level)

In January 2022, Honeycomb kicked off a one year experiment to have an employee sit as a voting board member on the board of directors. I became that board member in July 2022. As the experiment comes to a close, I want to share some of my reflections.

Culture

February 8, 2023

Valerie Silverthorne

The Case for SLOs

With one key practice, it’s possible to help your engineers sleep more, reduce friction between engineering and management, and simplify your monitoring to save money. No, really. We’re here to make the case that setting service level objectives (SLOs) is the game changer your team has been looking for.

Service Level Objectives

Visually Debug Your Systems With the Service Map Sandbox Scenario

February 6, 2023

Rebecca Carter

Get the Big Picture: Learn How to Visually Debug Your Systems with Service Map—Now Available in Sandbox

Honeycomb’s Service Map gives you the unique capability to filter by both services and traces so you can generate maps that isolate very specific areas of your environment. This helps you surface issues quickly and gain a granular understanding of how everything in your system works and evolves over time. And now that a Service Map scenario is available in our Sandbox, you can see it for yourself.

Debugging

Product Updates

Autocatalytic Adoption: Harnessing Patterns to Promote Honeycomb in Your Organization

February 2, 2023

Nick Travaglini

Autocatalytic Adoption: Harnessing Patterns to Promote Honeycomb in Your Organization

When an organization signs up for Honeycomb at the Enterprise account level, part of their support package is an assigned Technical Customer Success Manager. As one of these TCSMs, part of my responsibilities is helping a central observability team develop a strategy to help their colleagues learn how to make use of the product. At a minimum, this means making sure that they can log in, that relevant data is available, that they receive training on how to query, and perhaps that they collaborate with the rest of Honeycomb’s CS department to solve problems as they arise.

Observability

Teams & Collaboration

Your Data Just Got a Facelift: Introducing Honeycomb’s Data Visualization Updates

January 31, 2023

Sarrah Vesselov

Your Data Just Got a Facelift: Introducing Honeycomb’s Data Visualization Updates

Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work modernizing Honeycomb’s data visualizations to address consistency issues, confusing displays, access to settings, and to improve their overall look and feel.

Product Updates

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January 26, 2023

Michael Wilde

Surface and Confirm Buggy Patterns in Your Logs Without Slow Search

Incidents happen. What matters is how they’re handled. Most organizations have a strategy in place that starts with log searches—and logs/log searching are great, but log searching is also incredibly time consuming. Today, the goal is to get safer software out the door faster, and that means issues need to be discovered and resolved in the most efficient way possible.

Logging

Observability

January 24, 2023

Mike Terhar

Honeycomb, Meet Terraform

The best mechanism to combat proliferation of uncontrolled resources is to use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to create a common set of things that everyone can get comfortable using and referencing. This doesn’t block the ability to create ad hoc resources when desired—it’s about setting baselines that are available when people want answers to questions they’ve asked in the past.

Connectors & Integrations

Observability

January 18, 2023

Fred Hebert

Counting Forest Fires: Incident Response Metrics

There are limits to what individuals or teams on the ground can do, and while counting fires or their acreage can be useful to know the burden or impact they have, it isn’t a legitimate measure of success. Knowing whether your firefighters or whether your prevention campaigns are useful can’t rely on these high-level observations, because they’ll be drowned in the noise of a messy unpredictable world.

Incident Response

Authors’ Cut Spark Notes Edition: Jumpstart Your Observability Journey

January 13, 2023

Harrison Calato

Authors’ Cut Spark Notes Edition: Jumpstart Your Observability Journey

George Miranda, Liz Fong-Jones, and Charity Majors, held a series of live discussions called the Authors’ Cut to bring core concepts of the book to life by applying them to real-world use cases. Now that the series is complete, we thought it would be helpful to combine all of the discussion recaps for your viewing pleasure. Each blog post below takes key concepts from chapters in the book and makes them more digestible.

Observability

3 Easy Ways to Get Started With Distributed Tracing

January 11, 2023

Nick Rycar

3 Easy Ways to Get Started With Distributed Tracing

We’re here to show you three ways you can jumpstart a distributed tracing effort, starting small and expanding as it makes sense. These examples involve only a little code and perhaps a bit of a mindset change. Starting small with distributed tracing can even be fun, because who doesn’t like getting customized results without much work?

Tracing

A Sample of Sampling, and Observability at Scale

January 5, 2023

George Miranda

Author’s Cut—A Sample of Sampling, and a Whole Lot of Observability at Scale

In this post, we’re moving from the foundations of observability to things that become critical when you start practicing observability at scale. Tools like sampling and telemetry pipelines are useful at any size, but when your trickle of observability data suddenly becomes a torrential flood, these tools are essential.

Observability

Sampling

December 19, 2022

Nick Rycar

Happy o11ydays!

As 2022 draws to a close, the Honeycomb team is getting ready to take some time to recharge our collective batteries and get ready for the new year. For some of us, that means spending some well-earned time away from our keyboards. For others, it means we get to spend our computer time doing something just for fun.

Observability

December 15, 2022

Phillip Carter

OpenTelemetry 2022 Holiday Goodie Bag

We here at Honeycomb really like OpenTelemetry and goodie bags, so we have a nice little OpenTelemetry-flavored holiday goodie bag to share with you before you’re off for the holidays!

OpenTelemetry

Product Updates

Solving a Murder Mystery: The Columnar Datastore Bug

December 7, 2022

Guest Blogger

Solving a Murder Mystery

Bugs can remain dormant in a system for a long time, until they suddenly manifest themselves in weird and unexpected ways. The deeper in the stack they are, the more surprising they tend to be. One such bug reared its head within our columnar datastore in May this year, but had been present for more than two years before detection.

Debugging

Incident Response

New Honeycomb Integrations Let You Bubble Up Lurking AWS Issues

November 28, 2022

George Miranda

New Honeycomb Integrations Let You Bubble Up Lurking AWS Issues

Today, we’re announcing the expansion of Honeycomb integrations with various AWS services. This update now covers a much wider swath of AWS services, makes it easier than ever to integrate your AWS stack with Honeycomb, and with our new BubbleUp enhancements, you’ll be identifying and debugging hidden issues in your AWS stack faster than ever.

Connectors & Integrations

Product Updates

November 23, 2022

Lex Neva

The Incident Retrospective Ground Rules

I joined Honeycomb as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) midway through September, and it’s been a wild ride so far. One thing I was especially excited about was the opportunity to see Honeycomb’s incident retrospective process from the inside. I wasn’t disappointed!

Culture

Software Engineering

November 18, 2022

Nathan Lincoln

Scaling Ingest With Ingest Telemetry

With the introduction of Environments & Services, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the creation of new datasets. These new datasets are smaller than ones created with Honeycomb Classic, where customers would typically place all of their services under a single, large dataset. This change has presented some interesting scaling challenges, which I’ll detail in this post, along with the solution we used, and how we leveraged Honeycomb’s own telemetry to scale Honeycomb.

Dogfooding

Technical Deep Dives

Announcing New CircleCI + Honeycomb Integration Guide

November 14, 2022

George Miranda

Announcing New CircleCI + Honeycomb Integration Guide

If you’re writing software today, then you likely use a CI/CD pipeline to build and test your code before deploying it to production. Having a fast and efficient build pipeline saves you development time, shortens feedback loops, and helps you ship features faster. Conversely, slow and unreliable build pipelines are full of lost productivity and sadness.

Connectors & Integrations

Tutorials