The Fast Path to More Useful Telemetry

What Are Traces? A Developer’s Guide to Distributed Tracing

Honeycomb Users Are Living in the Future, Part 1: Sampling

Is Your Observability Strategy Boardroom-Ready?

Can Claude Code Observe Its Own Code?

One of the great things about OpenTelemetry is that it’s a standard, and standards tend to proliferate. I was excited to see Claude Code add OpenTelemetry metric and log support in a recent release.

Observability Without Tradeoffs: Introducing Powerful New Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline Features

Honeycomb Observability Day London: A Jam-Packed Day of Great Talks

Tales From the Trench: Building With LLMs and Honeycomb

AI discourse these days is all over the place. Depending on who you talk to, AI’s are absolute flash-in-the-pan junk, or they’re the best thing since sliced bread.

It’s The End Of Observability As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

In a really broad sense, the history of observability tools over the past couple of decades have been about a pretty simple concept: how do we make terabytes of heterogeneous telemetry data comprehensible to human beings?

Beyond Shift Left: Engineering Leaders Increase Speed and Resilience With Observability

We recently had the privilege of hosting several industry experts and technology executives across platform strategy, SRE, and engineering enablement for breakfast at our Observability Day in London.

Dashboards, or Launchpads?

Introducing Native Mobile Support in Honeycomb for Frontend Observability

You shipped your latest release. You tested it on emulators, QA devices, and the latest OS versions. But now it’s live and running on thousands or millions of real devices, across a jungle of screen sizes, hardware specs, OS versions, and network conditions. A user reports a crash on an old Samsung device over 3G. Someone else complains the app feels “sluggish” after updating. You dig through logs. Rebuild test cases. Ping the backend team. Try to reproduce. Yet, still no answers.

Understanding Your App’s Health With Core Mobile Vitals

There are certain important metrics that every mobile app has in common. At Honeycomb, we have surveyed these metrics across iOS and Android, and have defined a set of Core Mobile Vitals we think every app developer should care about. The purpose of these vitals is similar to that of Core Web Vitals for web frontends.

Gotta Go Slow

I anticipated this would be a challenging time and that I would be exhausted. So, the plan became: do all the demanding things, take my sabbatical in May, and use April as an ‘in-between’ period with a bit less pressure. I would willingly step off the gas and let other SREs on the team cover pressing matters, as a sort of pre-game for my full month away.

Unleash SaaS Data With the Webhookevent Receiver

There are many vendors, Honeycomb included, where actions on the application can emit a web request that goes to another service for coordination or tracking purposes. Many vendors have pre-built integrations, but some have a fallback that says “Custom Webhook” or similar. If you’re looking to create a full picture of your request flow, you would want these other services to show up in your trace waterfall.

Visualizing Session Flow With Honeycomb

I want to know what users are doing in my application. A distributed trace is the best way to show the data flow of one user interaction through my application, but it isn’t sufficient to show the overall user experience.

Reporting CSP Errors in Honeycomb With the OpenTelemetry Collector

The HTTP Content-Security-Policy response header is used to control how the browser is allowed to load various content types. It is used to control which URLs, fonts, images, scripts, and more can be loaded…

The Guide to Kubernetes Debugging

Kubernetes is widely used for deploying, scaling, and managing systems and applications and is an industry standard for container orchestration. Google engineers originally developed Kubernetes as an open-source project. Its first release was in September 2014, and since then, it has matured into a graduate project maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). With the complexities of scale and distributed systems, debugging in Kubernetes environments can be difficult.

Building a Simple Synthetic Monitor With OpenTelemetry

In this post, I’ll cover what synthetic monitoring is and show an example of how you can create a simple monitor using OpenTelemetry, .NET, and an Azure function. If you only want to see how it’s built, skip ahead to building a synthetic monitor.

How Much Should I Be Spending On Observability?

In last week’s piece, we talked about some of the factors that are driving costs up, both good and bad, and about whether your observability bill is (or should be) more of a cost center or an investment. In this piece, I’m going to talk more in depth about cost drivers and levers of control.