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Charity Majors
When do you delete instrumentation? You delete instrumentation when you delete code. Other than that, if you’re doing things right: almost never. One of the best things about honeycomb is that it completely transforms…
Josh Levin
Any significant shift in an organization’s software engineering culture has the potential to feel tectonic, and observability (o11y for short)—or more specifically, Observability Driven Development—is no different. Leaning into observability, which calls for tool-enhanced…
Martin Thwaites
Miss O11y is delighted to welcome our newest band member: Martin Thwaites! Martin has been a member of the Honeycomb user community practically since its inception. He is a UK-based consultant who specializes in…
Sarrah Vesselov
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…
Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)
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…
Vlad Ionescu
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…
Fred Hebert
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…
Liz Fong-Jones
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…
Michael Simo
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…
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…
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…
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…
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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….
Vera Reynolds
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
