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LoginDefensive Instrumentation Benefits Everyone
A lot of reasoning in content is predicated on the audience being in a modern, psychologically safe, agile sort of environment. It’s aspirational, so folks...
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...
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...
Datasets, Traces, and Spans—Oh My!
By giving an overview into datasets, traces, and spans, you’ll get a peek behind the curtain into how Honeycomb facilitates observability in the hopes of...
Webinar Recap: How to Avoid Being On Call With Under-Instrumented Tools
"It's expensive. It's difficult. Our APM works just fine." The three myths of observability can lead to being on call with under-instrumented tools. That's exactly...
Quickly Turn ALB/ELB Status Codes into an Issue-Seeking Heatmap
More often than not, as developers, when we get a report that a large customer is hitting 500 errors, there's a flurry of activity. What's...
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...
New Honeycomb Whitepaper on Frontend Observability
Big news: I can finally stop pointing anyone who asks about Honeycomb’s story for frontend observability to Emily’s blog post from 2017 on “Instrumenting Page...
Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Distro for Java reaches 1.0 release
Today, the Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Distribution for Java reaches a major milestone with a 1.0 release. This is the first Honeycomb OTel Distro to come out...
startSpan vs. startActiveSpan
TL;DR: startSpan is easier and measures a duration. Use it if your work won’t create any subspans. startActiveSpan requires that you pass a callback for...
OpenTelemetry (OTel) Is Key to Avoiding Vendor Lock-in
The promise of OpenTelemetry is that it can help you avoid vendor lock-in by allowing you to instrument your applications once, then send that data...
Ask Miss O11y: Observability Without Manual Tracing
I think my biggest question is: How do I introduce observability without manually weaving tracing-related code throughout my codebase since that adds a lot of...
What Is Auto-Instrumentation?
In the past, we’ve written about what instrumentation is and the insights it provides. Instrumenting your code generates telemetry that shows you how your system...
Ask Miss O11y: How Can I Add o11y to Databases?
How do we bring observability to the DB world? In the SQL Server world, you can marry up perfmon and extended event traces but is...
Ask Miss O11y, Holiday Edition
Hey Miss O11y, what’s your favorite thing about Christmas? Ooh, good question! My favorite thing about this part of the year is that work slows...