Observability: The 5-Year Retrospective

What Is Honeycomb’s ROI? Forrester’s Study on the Benefits of Observability

Register for the webinar and download the full study to see and apply Forrester’s financial model to determine the observability ROI for your organization.  Many teams want to adopt observability and Honeycomb—but run into…

Honeycomb Is All-In on OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry (or “OTel”) helps you get your instrumentation started quickly, and it helps you get the most out of that telemetry data by providing flexible exporting options. As a result, it’s emerging as the…

Why Observability Requires a Distributed Column Store

Honeycomb is known for its incredibly fast performance: you can sift through billions of rows, comparing high-cardinality data across thousands of fields, and get fast answers to your queries. And none of that is…

Tale of the Beagle (Or It Doesn’t Scale—Except When It Does)

If there’s one thing folks working in internet services love saying, it’s: Yeah, sure, but that won’t scale. It’s an easy complaint to make, but in this post, we’ll walk through building a service…

How Vanguard used Observability to Accelerate and De-risk their Cloud Migration

Rich Anakor, chief solutions architect at Vanguard, is on a small team with a big goal: Give Vanguard customers a better experience by enabling internal engineering teams to better understand their massively complex production…

How Slack Transformed Their CI With Tracing

Slack experienced meteoric growth between 2017 and 2020—but that level of growth came with growing pains. In his talk at the 2021 o11ycon+hnycon, Frank Chen (LinkedIn), a Slack Senior Staff Engineer, detailed one of Slack’s…

Shipping on a Spent Error Budget

Modern software services are expected to be highly available, and running a service with minimal interruptions requires a certain amount of reliability-focused engineering work. At the same time, teams also need to build new…

Data Availability Isn’t Observability

But it’s better than nothing… Most of the industry is racing to adopt better observability practices, and they’re discovering lots of power in being able to see and measure what their systems are doing….

Growing Adoption of Observability Powers Business Transformation

The Least Worst Online Conference Ever

I am sick of online events. I can barely rouse myself to give a shit about one more virtual conference. They all start to feel the same … the same 45-minute pre-recorded talks, over…

Lessons Learned From the Migration to Confluent Kafka

Over the last few months, Honeycomb’s platform team migrated to a new iteration of our ingest pipeline for customer events. Our migration to this newer architecture did not go too smoothly, as can be…

One Year of Graviton2 at Honeycomb

A year ago, we wrote about our experiences as early adopters of Graviton2, and how we were able to see 30% price-performance improvements on one dogfood workload from switching to the arm64 architecture. In…

Uniting Tracing and Logs With OpenTelemetry Span Events

The current landscape of what our customers are dealing with in monitoring and observability can be a bit of a mess. For one thing, there are varying expectations and implementations when it comes to…

Event Latency: What It Is and Why You Should Care

Recently, we added a new derived column function to Honeycomb, INGEST_TIMESTAMP(), which can help customers debug event latency and/or inaccurate timestamps. A meaningful minority of the events sent to Honeycomb are already old when…

HoneyByte: Test Out Refinery Yourself!

This HoneyByte walks through how to get Refinery running locally to try out different configuration options and sampling methods.

Sweetening Your Honey

Are you looking for a better way to troubleshoot, debug, and really see and understand what weird behavior is happening in production? Service-level objectives (SLOs) and observability can help you do all that—but they…

On Not Being a Cog in the Machine

This is my first week here as the first dedicated SRE for Honeycomb, and in a welcoming gesture, I was asked if I wanted to write a blog post about my first impressions and…

Honeycomb Raises $20 Million in Series B Funding

The Future of Developer Careers

While JavaScript frameworks come and go, a change has been brewing over the last several years that will permanently change what it means to be a modern developer: how our code goes from our…