Honeycomb Blog

Honeycomb FAQ in 140 Chars: Getting Started

November 28, 2016

Honeycomb FAQ in 140 Chars: Getting Started

Welcome! This will be a semi-regular series, where we answer frequently asked questions in short, digestible bites. Or if you prefer long philosophical essays about the future of observability, go here. Ten short questions…

The MySQL Slow Query Log, AWS Golang SDK, RDS and You

October 16, 2016

The MySQL Slow Query Log, AWS Golang SDK, RDS and You

Did you know you can do fun things with the MySQL slow query log, using the nothing but the AWS golang SDK for RDS? It’s true! In order to let you submit RDS logs…

Databases

October 12, 2016

MySQL and Honeycomb: My First 10 Minutes

As part of the process of building our RDS connector for Honeycomb, we ran it on our own database logs. A few neat things came out of the first 10 minutes of looking at…

Databases

Debugging

October 8, 2016

Honeycomb and the Five Whys: Summary Post

Anchor post at the top of this week’s long series of “vision” posts, so everything doesn’t just appear backwards. 🙂 This week we set forth the case for why Honeycomb is the future. We’ve…

October 6, 2016

Part 5/5: Building Badass Engineers and Badass Teams

No matter how much we love technology, it is always a means to an end. The mission comes first – we don’t do tech for its own sake, we use tech to get the…

October 6, 2016

Part 4/5: Everyone is a DBA

DBAs may be the last remaining priesthood in our industry. But software engineers and operations engineers are increasingly finding themselves responsible for precious company data, and DBAs are increasingly adopting generalist skillsets and best…

October 6, 2016

Part 3/5: Dear Operations Engineers

It’s time to shrug off the last vestiges of that martyr complex we’ve been trudging around with since the bad old days of the BOFH. We’ve got better things to do with our lives…

Operations

October 5, 2016

Part 2/5: Dear Software Engineers

Observability is not a thing for operations or some other team to care about. Software engineers, you are increasingly the primary owners of your own services … and this is a great thing. Developers,…

Software Engineering

October 5, 2016

Part 1/5: Asking Better Questions

Any mature production system is likely to have hundreds of thousands if not millions of metrics, most of which never get looked at by a human. Metrics and logs are no longer human-scale, they…

blog-Why Honeycomb_ Black Swans-SOCIAL (1)

October 4, 2016

Why Honeycomb? Black Swans, Unknown-Unknowns, and the Glorious Future of Doom

Hello friends! We need to talk – about Honeycomb, you, and the future. We’ve built this thing to help ourselves and one another deal with the future of software. It isn’t Yet Another Monitoring…

Enriching Nginx Logs with request_time, Server Data, and Other Goodies

September 15, 2016

Enriching Nginx Logs with request_time, Server Data, and Other Goodies

How can you make your nginx logs more awesome? Nginx has some fantastic data hiding in its log_format spec, but oddly enough, most of it is not enabled by default. Here are a couple…

Product Updates

how to fix latency spikes with honeycomb

August 24, 2016

Guest Blogger

Discovering and Exploring Web Latency Spikes

Last week, I got a signup invite for Honeycomb. My consulting business has a website management platform with modest but steady traffic, about 30k req/day. I was interested in using Honeycomb to watch the…

August 18, 2016

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 2: Migrating API Versions

Continued from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 1: The Long Tail. We recently released a new version of our API. As scarred veterans of building and supporting APIs, we made sure to retain backwards…

August 16, 2016

Honeycomb’s Open Source Connectors

We’re happy to announce 3 open sourced components to help you get your data into Honeycomb – 2 libraries and a log tailing utility. We have two libraries available to make it easy to…

Product Updates

August 9, 2016

Christine Yen

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 1: The Long Tail

This post is the first in our series of “dogfooding” posts. At Honeycomb, we dogfood everything: we try to solve all our own problems using our own service. And like any young company, we’re…