How We Use Smoke Tests to Gain Confidence in Our Code
Also known as confidence testing, smoke testing is intended to focus on some critical aspects of the software that are required as a baseline. The...
Three Ways to Make the Most out of Honeycomb Metrics
A while ago, we added Metrics to our observability platform so teams could easily see system information right next to their application observability data—no tool...
Ask Miss O11y: To Metric or to Trace?
Dear Miss O11y, I remember reading quite interesting opinions from you about usage of metrics and traces in an application. Did you elaborate on those...
Errors Got You Down? Honeycomb and OpenTelemetry are Here to Help
It’s 5:00 pm on a Friday. You’re wrapping up work, ready to head into the weekend, when one of your high-value customers Slacks you that...
Feature Focus: April 2023
You know the old saying, I’m sure: “April deploys bring May joys.” Okay, maybe it doesn’t go exactly like that, but after reading what we’ve...
Observability, Meet Natural Language Querying with Query Assistant
Engineers know best. No machine or tool will ever match the context and capacity that engineers have to make judgment calls about what a system...
Our Favorite #chArt
Heatmaps are a beautiful thing. So are charts. Even better is that sometimes, they end up producing unintentional—or intentional, in the case of our happy...
Observable Frontends: the State of OpenTelemetry in the Browser
The modern standard for observability in backend systems is: distributed traces with OpenTelemetry, plus dynamic aggregations over these events. This works very well in the...
Should Every Incident Get a Retro?
At a recent training session, Jeli spent a great deal of time covering incident retrospectives and what makes an incident worthy of studying. My colleague...
Alerting on the User Experience
When your alerts cover systems owned by different teams, who should be on call? We get this question a lot when talking about SLOs. We...
Honeycomb’s Deployment Protection Rule for GitHub Actions
Honeycomb's Deployment Protection Rule for GitHub Actions quickly enables canary deployments by letting you use Honeycomb query results to prevent deploying to your next target...
Achieving Great Dynamic Sampling with Refinery
Refinery, Honeycomb’s tail-based dynamic sampling proxy, often makes sampling feel like magic. This applies especially to dynamic sampling, because it ensures that interesting and unique...