Why UX Designers Don’t Feel Valued—and Why This Is a Problem for Your Business

It’s time we had a real conversation about why UX designers everywhere are still unhappy, why that elusive “seat at the table” feels so impossibly out of reach to so many (even at companies…

Ask Miss O11y: Logs vs. Traces

Tracing looks like a lot of work. We already have logs. Why bother adding traces? Ah, good question!  TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show connection, performance, concurrency, and causality. Logs are the original…

The power of asking questions

This is a guest post by Vlad Ionescu. Vlad Ionescu jokingly describes himself as a “Professional mistake avoider” which is a better way of saying “Independent Consultant.” His work focuses on getting companies to…

OnCallogy Sessions

Being on call is challenging. It’s signing up to be operating complex services in a totally interruptible manner, at all hours of the day or night, with limited context.  It’s therefore critical to have…

Ask Miss O11y: Pls ELI5 TLAs like PRO, SRE, and SLOs!

Dear Miss O11y, I’m confused by all of the Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) that have started popping up lately. This week, I got an email from Honeycomb saying that the “PRO” plan now has…

Top 5 Takeaways From GDC 2022

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is a yearly event that brings together leading brands in the gaming industry to talk about trends in development and showcase new features and releases. One of the cool…

Honeycomb Pro: Now With Metrics & SLOs

Honeycomb Pro is about to get even better. Starting today, all Pro accounts have access to Honeycomb Metrics and two Service Level Objectives (SLOs), previously only available to Enterprise accounts. Full disclosure: Later this…

A Better Environment for Observability, at Your Service

We’ve made some big changes under the hood at Honeycomb to give you better control over how you put your apps data to work—we’ve expanded our core data model with formal Environments and Services!…

Ask Miss O11y: Do I Need Observability If My Stack Is Boring?

Observability came out of microservices and cloud-native, right? If you have a simpler architecture, does o11y matter?” — this question came up during recent office hours Yeah, sort of. On both counts—yeah, it sorta…

Honeycomb Announces Support for AWS for Games

Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Distro for Java reaches 1.0 release

Today, the Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Distribution for Java reaches a major milestone with a 1.0 release. This is the first Honeycomb OTel Distro to come out of beta and go into the general release category,…

startSpan vs. startActiveSpan

TL;DR: startSpan is easier and measures a duration. Use it if your work won’t create any subspans. startActiveSpan requires that you pass a callback for the work in the span, and then any spans…

Honeycomb Terraform Provider Now Officially Supported by Honeycomb

Previously announced as a community-led project, the Terraform provider for Honeycomb is now officially maintained by Honeycomb in partnership with Hashicorp. We recognize how valuable supporting configuration as code is for our customers, and…

On the Brittleness of Dashboards

Dashboards are one of the most basic and popular tools software engineers use to operate their systems. In this post, I’ll make the argument that their use is unfortunately too widespread, and that the…

Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry: Who’s There? The Resource.

I’m adding instrumentation code to my app. To set it up, I have to create a Resource. What does that mean? What can I do with it? Ah, I too have wondered about this….

OpenTelemetry (OTel) Is Key to Avoiding Vendor Lock-in

The promise of OpenTelemetry is that it can help you avoid vendor lock-in by allowing you to instrument your applications once, then send that data to any backend of your choice. This post shows…

Ask Miss O11y: OpenTelemetry in the Front End: Tracing Across Page Load

We want to measure the time that a user waits between pushing a button and seeing their result. The examples for creating a trace span only work within a single page, and the button…

The Truth About “MEH-TRICS”

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I said a lot of inflammatory things about metrics. “Metrics are shit salad.” “Metrics are simply nerfed dimensions.” “Metrics suck,” “metrics are legacy,” “metrics…

Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry—Context

“What is up with the Context in OpenTelemetry? Why do I need to mess with it at all? Why, when I set a span as active, don’t subsequent spans just use it as a…

How We Define SRE Work

At the time of writing this post, I have officially been at Honeycomb for one year as a site reliability engineer (SRE). I had shared my initial experiences and impressions in this post and…