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Charity Majors
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…
Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)
“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…
Fred Hebert
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…
“There’s a lot to understand in OpenTelemetry; for instance, what is the difference between a Tracer and a TracerProvider? How should I use them?” OpenTelemetry is a strong standard for instrumentation because it is…
You probably have already answered this before, but do you have a good rule of thumb for where o11y [observability] ends and BI [business intelligence]/data warehouses begin? Yes! While data is data (and tools…
Jessica McElroy
Ever wonder how your teammates go about debugging? When you use Honeycomb, you’re not only getting observability into your systems; it also provides observability into how your teammates use Honeycomb! Very meta, no? You’re…
Should we build and run the full observability stack in pre-prod? How much realism vs. waiting for prod? Answer: Yes. You absolutely want observability in pre-production environments—local, dev, performance test, staging, CI, everywhere. Why?…
Guest Blogger
This article originally appeared on the Booking.com engineering blog. For more by the author, visit his blog www.codecapsule.com. With more than 1.5M room nights booked per day, Booking.com requires a solid infrastructure that’s constantly…
Liz Fong-Jones
Dear Miss O11y, How do I think about instrumenting and setting service-level objectives (SLOs) on streaming RPC workloads with long-lived connections? We won’t necessarily have a “success” metric per stream to make a percentage…
Evelyn Chea
We know that you value collaboration. That’s why we share incident reviews and learnings—because we believe the entire community benefits by working together transparently. In the spirit of working better together, we invited ecosystem…
I think my biggest question is: How do I introduce observability without manually weaving tracing-related code throughout my codebase since that adds a lot of noise? TL;DR: Use auto-instrumentation from OpenTelemetry. Traces will happen….
Mike Goldsmith
Instrumenting your code generates telemetry that shows you how your system is performing, and whether your system is healthy.
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How do we bring observability to the DB world? In the SQL Server world, you can marry up perfmon and extended event traces but is that enough? What about the other DBs? Oh goody,…
Harrison Calato
What are the foundational elements of a high-performance engineering team? While there’s no silver bullet, a few common threads make up the fabric of engineering teams that set the standard for velocity, quality, and…
Pete Hodgson
It’s harder to understand and operate production systems in 2021 than it was in 2001. Why is that? Shouldn’t we have gotten better at this in the past two decades? There are valid reasons…
We here at Honeycomb have some pretty strong opinions on the interviewing and hiring process: Namely, that it is broken af in our industry, for engineering and non-engineering roles alike. Too often, it seeks…
Hey Miss O11y, what’s your favorite thing about Christmas? Ooh, good question! My favorite thing about this part of the year is that work slows down, everybody is on vacation, and those of us…
Danyel Fisher
At Honeycomb Developer Week, I got an opportunity to walk through a couple of fun new features we’ve shipped since August and ways that we’ve been able to improve Honeycomb for you. Hearing feedback…
Observability is a great way to understand how your system is operating in production, diagnose errors when systems fail, and find subtle gaps in logic. But there’s no reason to wait until your code…
Steve Lewis
On November 18, between 00:50 and 00:56 UTC, an update was deployed that improved Honeycomb’s business intelligence (BI) telemetry available from our production operations environment. Contained within that update was a defect that escaped…
