Sustainable Operations in Complex Systems with Production Excellence

Dynamic Sampling by Example

Last week, Rachel published a guide describing the advantages of dynamic sampling. In it, we discussed varying sample rates to achieve a target collection rate overall, and having different sample rates for distinct kinds…

Stop Your Database From Hating You With This One Weird Trick

Let’s not bury the lede here: we use Observability-Driven Development at Honeycomb to identify and prevent DB load issues. Like every online service, we experience this familiar cycle: You start with an idea and…

Not Everything Is Tech Debt, There are two stories here, and one is about risk

Liz Fong-Jones on How to Secure SSH with Two Factor Authorization

A New Bee’s First Oncall

I’m Honeycomb’s newest engineer, now on my eighth week at Honeycomb. Excitingly, I did my first week of oncall two weeks ago! Almost every engineer at Honeycomb participates in oncall, and I chose to…

Tracing and Observability for Background Jobs

Illuminating the under-loved with Honeycomb Most modern web apps end up sprouting some subset of tasks that happen in the “background”, i.e., when a user is not directly waiting on the request from a…

Yes, I Test in Production (And So Do You)

Honeycomb CEO Charity Majors on Sharing Customer Pain

BubbleUp Meets Tracing (and Other Odd-shaped Data)

A few weeks ago, BubbleUp came out of Beta. We’ve been getting fantastic user feedback on how BubbleUp helps users speed through the Core Analysis Loop and lets people find things they never could…

Introducing Honeycomb Learn

Observability-Driven Development for Tackling the Great Unknown

Always Bee Tracing, SF/Bay Area Jan 24. 2019

Metric Analysis, Application Performance Monitoring, and Log Management: Where Does Honeycomb Fit In?

If you’re involved in improving the performance of your application, you’ve probably heard about application performance monitoring (APM), metric analysis, and log management. But you might not understand what they are or the differences…

How Much Should My Observability Stack Cost?

UPDATE: Charity has written an update on observability spend for 2025 with new figures. Read the two-part blog series here: Part 1: Is your observability a cost or an investment? Part 2: Observability cost…

Spooky Tales of Testing In Production: A Recap and Lessons Learned

The Core Analysis Loop, or: Heatmaps Make Analysis Better

In this blog miniseries, I’m talking about how to think about doing data analysis, the Honeycomb way. In Part I, I talked about how heatmaps help us understand how data analysis works. In Part…

Heatmaps Make Ops Better

In this blog miniseries, I’d like to talk about how to think about doing data analysis “the Honeycomb way.”  Welcome to part 1, where I cover what a heatmap is—and how using them can…

Fastly's Lisa Phillips interviews Honeycomb CEO Charity Majors

Power to the People: Control Your Own Trigger Destiny with Webhooks

When we release something new, whether it’s a new SDK or Beeline or a new feature in the UI, we’ll often set a Honeycomb Trigger to keep track of its use. Sometimes we don’t…