HoneyByte: Using Application Metrics With Prometheus Clients

Have you ever deep dived into the sea of your tracing data, but wanted additional context around your underlying system? For instance, it may be easy to see when/where certain users are experiencing latency,…

Ask Miss O11y: Load Testing With Fidelity

Dear Miss O11y, My developers and I can’t agree about what the right approach is for running load tests in production. Should we even be running load tests against our production infrastructure or is…

Tracing Makes Concurrency Bugs Easy to Spot

Today, I found a concurrency bug before I noticed it. Like, it was subtle, and so I wasn’t quite sure I saw it—maybe I hadn’t hit refresh yet? Later, I looked at the trace…

Ask Miss O11y: Tracing Is for Async, Too

I have a good sense of how to use traces to understand my system’s behavior within request/response cycles. What about multi-request processes? What about async tasks spawned within a request? Is there a higher-level…

Hone Your Observability Skills at Honeycomb Developer Week

Is the lack of time holding you back from sharpening your observability (o11y) skills? Maybe you’ve dipped your toes into o11y, but you’re not sure how and where it will drastically improve your team’s…

Scaling Kafka at Honeycomb

When you send telemetry into Honeycomb, our infrastructure needs to buffer your data before processing it in our “retriever” columnar storage database. For the entirety of Honeycomb’s existence, we have used Apache Kafka to…

Ask Miss O11y: Mapping Out Your Observability Journey

Dear Miss O11y: It feels so overwhelming to get started with observability. I want to use Honeycomb, but it feels like I can’t justify spending the time and money without having proof of how…

Ask Miss O11y: I Don’t Want to Be On Call Anymore. Am I a Monster?

“Can a subject matter expert ever step down?” Have you written anything about how to solve the ‘nobody wants to be on-call as a subject matter expert to support people handling incidents’ problem? My best idea…

Incident Resolution: Do You Remember, the Twenty Fires of September?

From September to early October, Honeycomb declared five public incidents. Internally, the whole month was part of a broader operational burden, where over 20 different issues interrupted normal work. A fraction of them had…

Game Launches Should Be Exciting for Your Players, Not for Your LiveOps Team

This blog was co-authored by Amy Davis.  The moment of launching something new at a game studio (titles, experiences, features, subscriptions) is a blockbuster moment that hangs in the balance. The architecture—distributed and complex,…

Stand-Up Meetings Are Dead (and What to Do Instead)

Stand-up meetings. Is anyone happy with them at this point? They were supposed to help teams work in a more agile manner but they were already controversial in the before times and moving to…

Honeycomb Closes $50 Million Series C Round

How Honeycomb Is Using $50M in New Funding to Bring Observability to All

Today, we announced that Honeycomb has raised $50M in Series C funding, in a round led by Insight Partners and joined by all existing investors from our Series B. We’re using this investment to…

Vendor Switching With OpenTelemetry (OTel)

You might already know that OpenTelemetry is the future of instrumentation. It’s an open-source and vendor-neutral instrumentation framework that frees you from the trap of using proprietary libraries simply to understand how your code…

The Magic of Metrics—and How It Can Burn You

As product developers, our responsibility continues beyond shipping code. To keep our software running, we need to notice whether it’s working in production. To make our product smoother and more reliable, we need to…

Honeycomb Differentiators Series: SLOs That Tell the Whole Story

In the recent past, most engineering teams had a vague notion of what Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) were—mainly things that their more business-focused colleagues talked about at length during…

Understanding Lambda Sleep Cycles With CONCURRENCY

CONCURRENCY is now enabled for all customers. See our docs page for information about how it works and how to use it effectively. Questions or would like to test out CONCURRENCY and Honeycomb? Sign…

Observability: The 5-Year Retrospective

Two years ago, I wrote a long retrospective of observability for its third anniversary. It includes a history of instrumentation and telemetry, a detailed explanation of the technical spec, and why the whole “three pillars” thing…

How Refinery Helps With Sampling Complex Event Data

Sampling is the practice of extracting a subset of data from a dataset to make conclusions about that larger dataset. It’s far from a perfect solution, but when it’s implemented with Refinery, Honeycomb’s trace-aware…

Metrics now generally available in Honeycomb

Join us for a live tour & Q&A session on Honeycomb Metrics. Ready to get hands-on? Honeycomb Metrics is already included in Enterprise subscriptions. Existing Free or Pro customers can request an Enterprise trial to try…