HoneyByte: Make a Beeline Toward Observability Just Like DEV’s Molly Struve

“When things broke,” Molly explained, “you’re mad scrambling—jumping from website to website to website, trying to put the pieces together.” Molly was able to use Honeycomb to fix things up: “It makes my job…

Honeycomb Delivers Support for OpenTelemetry - Zero Code Change Required

Right at Home in My New Role

(Get it? Because I’m working from home…) Hi, I’m Shelby 👋 I’m a new Developer Advocate at Honeycomb. The New Normal What a strange time to be changing jobs. I’m thrilled about my new…

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…

OpenTelemetry: New Honeycomb Exporters

We’re really big fans of OpenTelemetry at Honeycomb. As we’ve blogged about before, OpenTelemetry is the next phase of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. Instead of working on separate but similar efforts, those two…

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…

Chad Malchow, VP Sales Joins Honeycomb

Welcome to the Hive & Observability Community. Though it may ultimately be remembered for a multitude of other things, for us at Honeycomb, 2019 was the Year of Observability. Observability grew from a misunderstood…

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…

What happens when a seasoned engineer goes on vacation?

Have you ever experienced a time when someone on your team takes off to recharge or takes unplanned downtime away from work? It may feel a bit scary as workloads shift, priorities change and…

Bring Test Engineering into your DevOps practice

What do a test engineer and a DevOps or SRE team member have in common? The reality is that different teams need to proactively understand what is happening in production at critical milestones along…

“Hot-take” on 3 Popular Open Source Tools & The Observability Landscape

New eGuide takes a closer look at Prometheus, ELK and Jaeger: Open source tooling has its benefits. No licensing costs and you’re free to download, get started and modify over time. If something goes…

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…

Instrumenting Lambda with Traces: A Complete Example in Python

We’re big fans of AWS Lambda at Honeycomb. As you may have read, we recently made some major improvements to our storage engine by leveraging Lambda to process more data in less time. Making…

Honeycomb SLO Now Generally Available: Success, Defined.

Honeycomb now offers SLOs, aka Service Level Objectives. This is the second in a set of of essays on creating SLOs from first principles. Previously, in this series, we created a derived column to…

2019: The Year Bee-hind Us

Once again we are at the end of another year, facing into the endless potential of the next one, and thinking back on the fun and hard work behind us. Join me now in…

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