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. What was really interesting—beyond the ability to capture usage data from Claude Code—is that you can also get pretty detailed logs about what you’re doing with Claude Code. For instance, how many tokens are being used for each model, which tools are being called, and the length of your sessions.

With this release, you can more easily build and reconfigure telemetry pipelines and sample safely with the ability to easily pull full-fidelity data from your own archive whenever you need it. 

On May 15th, 2025, Honeycomb hosted Observability Day (or O11yDay) in the London financial district. The skies were clear and the weather was wonderful and we had a huge turnout, from our networking breakfast to the happy hour at the end of the day.

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. I want to cut through the noise, though, and see for myself what someone can do out here on the bleeding edge. Thus, I’m setting myself a challenge: write a usable—and useful—application with Claude Code, from soup to nuts.

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? New Relic did this for the Rails revolution, Datadog did it for the rise of AWS, and Honeycomb led the way for OpenTelemetry.

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. We noted that they’re all facing the same fundamental tension: deliver faster, scale smarter, stay resilient, and somehow get ahead of what’s coming next. But how do you move fast without breaking things? And how do you prove the value of the things you don’t break?

I have a personal vendetta against “dashboards.” Not because they're not useful—I actually think they’re extremely useful—but rather because they're generally built with the wrong user in mind, then used by a completely different user, and for a different use case. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.