Application performance management leaps from tribal knowledge to digital dashboard

Incident Review: Meta-Review, August 2020

Every once in a while, teams or systems hit an inflection point where enough things change at once and the pattern of incidents shifts. We found ourselves at an inflection point like that last week.

Getting Started With the Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Tutorial

Honeycomb allows you to send in data from a variety of sources. The steps to get there are a choose-your-own-adventure path and the choices to make may not always be clear to folks new…

HoneyByte: Get a Taste for Sampling

Honeycomb’s event-based pricing model is pretty simple: we only care about how many events you send. For teams running workloads at scale, the question becomes: are all of my events worth keeping? How can you reduce overall event volume while maintaining fidelity? This HoneyByte is all about sampling strategies you can use to lower costs without sacrificing the value of your data.

Using Honeycomb to Investigate a Redis Connection Leak

This is a guest post by Alex Vondrak, Senior Platform Engineer at true[X]. This is the story of how I used Honeycomb to troubleshoot redis/redis-rb#924 and discovered a surprising workaround. The Problem Emergent failures…

A Next Step Beyond Test Driven Development

The most successful software development movement of my lifetime is probably test-driven development or TDD. With TDD, requirements are turned into very specific test cases, then the code is improved so the tests pass….

A Next Step Beyond Test Driven Development

The New Stack Context: Observability in the Time of Covid

Observability and the Misleading Promise of AIOps

Sharing Context Across Space and Time: Honeycomb for Teams

When Charity and I started pitching Honeycomb, we had a “bit” we would do, on the importance of building for teams: I’d identify her as the {Kafka, Mongo, insert tech-of-the-moment here} expert on the…

Challenges with Implementing SLOs

A few months ago, Honeycomb released our SLO — Service Level Objective — feature to the world. We’ve written before about how to use it and some of the use scenarios. Today, I’d like…

Observations on ARM64 & AWS’s Amazon EC2 M6g Instances

At re:Invent in December, Amazon announced the AWS Graviton2 processor and its forthcoming availability powering Amazon EC2 M6g instances. While the first-generation Graviton processor that powered A1 instances was better suited to less compute-intensive…

The Future of Software is a Sociotechnical Problem

“Sociotechnical” I learned this word from Liz Fong-Jones recently, and it immediately entered my daily lexicon. You know exactly what it means as soon as you hear it, and then you wonder how you…

Honeycomb Welcomes New VP Engineering

(Why it’s so important to look inside your org before you look outside) I am delighted to announce that we have a new VP of engineering: our own Emily Nakashima, formerly director of engineering…

They Aren’t Pillars, They’re Lenses

To have Observability is to have the ability to understand your system’s internal state based on signals and externally-visible output. Honeycomb’s approach to Observability is to strive toward this: every feature of the product…

Reducing Build Time with Observability in the Software Supply Chain

Using Honeycomb to remember to delete a feature flag

Feature flags are great and serve us in so many ways. However, we do not love long-lived feature flags. They lead to more complicated code, and when we inevitably default them to be true…

Getting At The Good Stuff: How To Sample Traces in Honeycomb

(This is the first post by our new head of Customer Success, Irving.) Sampling is a must for applications at scale; it’s a technique for reducing the burden on your infrastructure and telemetry systems…

10 tech startups for 2020 that will help the world build more resilient, secure, and observable software

From “Secondary Storage” To Just “Storage”: A Tale of Lambdas, LZ4, and Garbage Collection

When we introduced Secondary Storage two years ago, it was a deliberate compromise between economy and performance.