Blog

Category: Instrumentation

OpenTelemetry   Instrumentation  

OpenTelemetry Best Practices #2 Agents, Sidecars, Collectors, Coded Instrumentation

For years, we’ve been installing what vendors have referred to as “agents” that reach into our applications and pull out useful telemetry information from them....

Product Updates   Instrumentation  

Safer Client-Side Instrumentation with Honeycomb's Ingest-Only API Keys

We're delighted to introduce our new Ingest API Keys, a significant step toward enabling all Honeycomb customers to manage their observability complexity simply, efficiently, and...

OpenTelemetry   Instrumentation  

Avoid Stubbing Your Toe on Telemetry Changes

When you have questions about your software, telemetry data is there for you. Over time, you make friends with your data, learning what queries take...

Instrumentation  

Defensive 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...

Instrumentation   Ask Miss O11y  

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...

Instrumentation   Ask Miss O11y  

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...

Observability   Instrumentation  

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...

Observability   Instrumentation  

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...

Tutorials   Instrumentation  

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...

Instrumentation   Ask Miss O11y  

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...

Instrumentation  

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...

Instrumentation  

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...

Tracing   Instrumentation  

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...

Instrumentation  

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...

Tracing   Instrumentation  

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...

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