Understand Your AWS Cost & Usage with Honeycomb

First published in August 2019. AWS bills are notoriously complicated, and the Amazon Cost Explorer doesn’t always make it easy to understand exactly where your money is going. When we embarked on our journey…

Observability — A 3-Year Retrospective

Treading in Haunted Graveyards

Part 1: CI/CD for Infrastructure as Code At Honeycomb, we’ve often discussed the value of making software deployments early and often, and being able to understand your code as it runs in production. However,…

Making Instrumentation Extensible

Observability-driven development requires both rich query capabilities and sufficient instrumentation in order to capture the nuances of developers’ intention and useful dimensions of cardinality. When our systems are running in containers, we need an…

Reflections on Monitorama 2019

This year was my third in a row attending (and now speaking at!) Monitorama. Because the organizers do a great job of turning introverts into extroverts for three days straight, it’s always a fun…

Investigating Timeouts With Tracing Using Sentry

Tracing is one of the key tools that Honeycomb offers to make sense of data. Over the last few weeks, we’ve made a number of improvements to our tracing interface — and, put together,…

Automating Collection of Troubleshooting Data with Triggers: a How-To Guide

Everyone wants to be more efficient — to spend less time on the tedious things, and more time on the things that move the needle. As much as possible, if you can automate those…

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