Fueling system discovery with observability

Honeycomb vs Elastic Stack: It’s About Priorities

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that although collecting and reviewing metrics and logs is a core part of running a stable and successful service, access to raw events and the ability to…

Level Up with Derived Columns: Two Neat Tricks That Will Improve Your Observability

When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t realize just how many different ways folks could use them. We…

O11yCon 2018: Notes and Observations

O11ycon Discusses Benefits and Challenges of Observability

Level Up With Derived Columns: Bucketing Events For Comparison

When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t realize just how many different ways folks could use…

There And Back Again: A Honeycomb Tracing Story

In our previous post about Honeycomb Tracing, we used tracing to better understand Honeycomb’s own query path. When doing this kind of investigation, you typically have to go back and forth, zooming out and back…

Level Up With Derived Columns: Understanding Screen Size (With Basic Arithmetic)

When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t realize just how many different ways folks could use them. We…

How Are Structured Logs Different From Events?

We’re all collectively trying to define observability (“o11y,” pronounced “olly”) these days, and, as Honeycomb is sometimes described as an event-based observability product, trying to define all the other words that go around o11y…

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 9: Tracing The Query Path

This post continues our long-running dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb Part 8: A Bee’s Life. To understand how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb at a high level, check out our dogfooding blog posts first — they do…

Get deeper insights with Honeycomb Tracing

We’re excited to introduce Honeycomb Tracing! Now, you can both: Visualize individual traces to deeply understand request execution, and Break down, filter, and aggregate trace data to uncover patterns, find outliers, and understand historical…

Get Observability for Your Mobile Apps with Honeycomb

If you think about it, mobile apps are among the production services most in need of real observability: nearly countless hardware platforms and operating systems in combination with your app’s code result in a…

Observability: A Manifesto

Everybody and their freaking grandpa is now claiming to do observability, not stodgy old monitoring. Fine, great. Nice to be trendy I guess. But are they? What’s the difference? You all know how I…

Resolving High CPU Usage in Kubernetes With Honeycomb

At Honeycomb, we’re excited about Kubernetes. In fact, we’re in the early stages of moving some of our services to k8s. Tools like kops have made getting started with k8s easier than ever. But…

How to Use NLog for Structured Logging

We’re grateful for this guest post from Tim Wilde! You can find the source code for the examples he uses in his github repo. Strings are where data go to die There you go;…

Live on the Edge with Honeycomb and CloudFront

Here at Honeycomb, we know that you can get big benefits quickly by starting with observability at the edge. No, not that Edge. The other edge. That’s why today we’re pleased to announce the…

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb Part 8: A Bee’s Life

This post continues our dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 7: Measure twice, cut once: How we made our queries 50% faster…with data. To understand how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb at a high…

Best Practices for Observability

Observability has been getting a lot of attention recently. What started out as a fairly obscure technical term, dragged from the dusty annals of control theory, has been generating attention for one simple reason:…

Metrics: not the observability droids you’re looking for

I went to Monitorama last year for my first time. It was great; I had a terrific time. But I couldn’t help but notice how speaker after speaker in talk after talk spent time…

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 7: Measure twice, cut once: How we made our queries 50% faster…with data

This post continues our dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 6: Instrumenting a Production Service . The entire value proposition of Honeycomb’s columnar store is speed of queries, for instance: Examining over…