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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…
Charity Majors
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…
Jessica Kerr (Jessitron)
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…
Fred Hebert
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…
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…
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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.
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,…
