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Ask Miss O11y

Ask Miss O11y: To Metric or To Trace?
May 9, 2023
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

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 points in a blog post somewhere, so I can read your arguments to forge some advice for myself? I must admit that I was quite puzzled by your stance regarding the (un)usefulness of metrics compared to traces in apps in some contexts (debugging).

Ask Miss O11y
Metrics
Tracing
Ask Miss O11y: Is There a Beginner’s Guide to Adding Observability to Your Applications?
March 22, 2023
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Ask Miss O11y: Is There a Beginner’s Guide On How to Add Observability to Your Applications?

Dear Miss O11y, I want to make my microservices more observable. Currently, I only have logs. I’ll add metrics soon, but I’m not really sure if there is a set path you follow. Is a guide of some sort, or best practice, like you have to have x kinds of metrics? I just want to know what all possibilities are out there. I am very new to this space.

Ask Miss O11y
Observability
Ask Miss O11y: Error: missing ‘x-honeycomb-dataset’ header
March 9, 2023
Jessica Kerr

Jessica Kerr

Ask Miss O11y: Error: missing ‘x-honeycomb-dataset’ header

Your API Key (in the x-honeycomb-team header) tells Honeycomb where to put your data. It specifies a team and an environment. Then, Honeycomb figures out which dataset to put each event in, based on the service.name field in the event. Except…

Ask Miss O11y
Ask Miss O11y – Martin – Availability Checks
September 22, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

How Do I Do Availability Checks in Honeycomb?

Let’s dig into what we mean by an Availability Check and how that maps to observability, tracing, and supporting production systems.

Ask Miss O11y
Observability
AMO – Jessitron – Instrumenting for Observability
September 1, 2022
Jessica Kerr

Jessica Kerr

Ask Miss O11y: How Can I Convince My Organization to Invest in Instrumenting for Observability?

“Dear Miss O11y, I’ve been following Honeycomb for a long time, and I understand where the insights from observability fit in. But larger orgs haven’t experienced this yet. When you’re talking to a C-level executive or director, how do you speak to this? What success stories do you cite that have traction at this level?”

Ask Miss O11y
Instrumentation
Ask Miss O11y – What do observability teams do
August 4, 2022
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

Ask Miss O11y: What Should An “Observability Team” Do?

People use “observability team” as a catchall basket for all kinds of things these days—from cutting-edge tech to truly heinous hacks. Eh, it is what it is. The industry may be in a roiling state of massive flux, but I’m cautiously excited about the changes beginning to take shape and emerge from the muck. And I definitely think it’s worth spending some time talking about what observability teams can and should be.

Ask Miss O11y
Observability
Ask Miss O11y – Martin – Instrumenting your code
July 26, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Ask Miss O11y: My Manager Won’t Let Me Spend Any Time Instrumenting My Code

In the same way as the business is likely ok with you writing developer-based tests (unit, automation, integration), instrumentation is the same. The conversation we need to have is that instrumentation, or knowing the system is healthy, is the work we need to do for the feature. In my opinion, it’s even more important than those.

Ask Miss O11y
Instrumentation
blog_AMO_liz
June 16, 2022
Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones

Going On Call for the First Time

Miss O11y addresses common concerns of being on call and provides helpful advice on how to overcome any fear it may bring.

Ask Miss O11y
Best Practices
Culture
blog_AMO_martin
June 9, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

What the Hell is Activity Anyway?

Dear Miss O11y, I use .NET and I keep seeing something called `Activity` but in OpenTelemetry there is only talk about “Span” and “Trace,” why? And what should I be using? Kthxbye This is…

Ask Miss O11y
OpenTelemetry
blog_AMO_jessitron
June 6, 2022
Jessica Kerr

Jessica Kerr

Ask Miss O11y: As a developer, how can I try out observability?

Dear Miss o11y, What’s the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for something else? Observability doesn’t have to be a big,…

Ask Miss O11y
OpenTelemetry
blog_AMO_martin
May 19, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Ask Miss O11y: Is the OpenTelemetry Collector useful?

Dear Miss O11y, I’ve been told I need to use the OpenTelemetry Collector, but I have no idea what it is, or why I need it? Should I be using it? What value does…

Ask Miss O11y
blog_AMO_liz
May 12, 2022
Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones

Ask Miss O11y: Not Your Aunt’s Tracing

Dear Miss O11y, How is modern observability using tracing, such as Honeycomb, different from the previous distributed tracing software I’m familiar with, like Dapper, at my company? I haven’t really been able to wrap…

Ask Miss O11y
Tracing
blog_AMO_charity
April 29, 2022
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

Ask Miss O11y: When should you delete instrumentation?

When do you delete instrumentation? You delete instrumentation when you delete code. Other than that, if you’re doing things right: almost never. One of the best things about honeycomb is that it completely transforms…

Ask Miss O11y
Instrumentation
blog_AMO_martin
April 21, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Ask Miss O11y: Baggage in OTel

Miss O11y is delighted to welcome our newest band member: Martin Thwaites! Martin has been a member of the Honeycomb user community practically since its inception. He is a UK-based consultant who specializes in…

Ask Miss O11y
Tracing
blog_AMO_jessitron
April 15, 2022
Jessica Kerr

Jessica Kerr

Ask Miss O11y: Logs vs. Traces

Tracing looks like a lot of work. We already have logs. Why bother adding traces? Ah, good question!  TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show connection, performance, concurrency, and causality. Logs are the original…

Ask Miss O11y
blog_AMO_liz
April 7, 2022
Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones

Ask Miss O11y: Pls ELI5 TLAs like PRO, SRE, and SLOs!

Dear Miss O11y, I’m confused by all of the Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) that have started popping up lately. This week, I got an email from Honeycomb saying that the “PRO” plan now has…

Ask Miss O11y
Service Level Objectives
blog_AMO_charity
March 24, 2022
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

Ask Miss O11y: Do I Need Observability If My Stack Is Boring?

Observability came out of microservices and cloud-native, right? If you have a simpler architecture, does o11y matter?” — this question came up during recent office hours Yeah, sort of. On both counts—yeah, it sorta…

Ask Miss O11y
blog_AMO_jessitron
March 4, 2022
Jessica Kerr

Jessica Kerr

Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry: Who’s There? The Resource.

I’m adding instrumentation code to my app. To set it up, I have to create a Resource. What does that mean? What can I do with it? Ah, I too have wondered about this….

Ask Miss O11y
blog_AMO_jessitron
February 25, 2022
Jessica Kerr

Jessica Kerr

Ask Miss O11y: OpenTelemetry in the Front End: Tracing Across Page Load

We want to measure the time that a user waits between pushing a button and seeing their result. The examples for creating a trace span only work within a single page, and the button…

Ask Miss O11y
blog_AMO_jessitron
February 17, 2022
Jessica Kerr

Jessica Kerr

Ask Miss O11y: Making Sense of OpenTelemetry—Context

“What is up with the Context in OpenTelemetry? Why do I need to mess with it at all? Why, when I set a span as active, don’t subsequent spans just use it as a…

Ask Miss O11y