Real User Monitoring With a Splash of OpenTelemetry
You're probably familiar with the concept of real user monitoring (RUM) and how it's used to monitor websites or mobile applications. If not, here's the...
Transitioning to OpenTelemetry
This article touches on how we at Birdie handled our transition from logs towards using OpenTelemetry as the primary mechanism for achieving world-class observability of...
Instrumenting a Demo App With OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb
A few days ago, I was in a meeting with a prospect who was just starting to try out OpenTelemetry. One of the things that...
Observing Core Web Vitals with OpenTelemetry: Part Two
In a previous blog post, we outlined how to set up our own auto-instrumentation to send Core Web Vitals data to Honeycomb. We recently released...
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....
OpenTelemetry Best Practices #1: Naming
Naming things, and specifically consistently naming things, is still one of the most useful pieces of work you can do in telemetry. It’s often overlooked...
Sending OpenTelemetry Data From AWS Lambda to Honeycomb
In this post, Chris describes how to send OpenTelemetry (OTel) data from an AWS Lambda instance to Honeycomb....
Much Ado About OpenTelemetry
There is so much good work that OpenTelemetry has done in the software industry, specifically around the domain of observability, in the last five years....
Data Sovereignty and OpenTelemetry
In today’s economic and regulatory environment, data sovereignty is increasingly top of mind for observability teams. The rules and regulations surrounding telemetry data can often...
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...
Effective Trace Instrumentation with Semantic Conventions
There’s plenty of literature on the mechanics of instrumenting code with OpenTelemetry and delivering it to Honeycomb. However, I’ve not found many guides on the...
Building a Secure OpenTelemetry Collector
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a core part of telemetry pipelines, which makes it one of the parts of your infrastructure that must be as secure...
Action Recommended: OpenTelemetry HTTP Attributes Breaking Changes
Earlier this year, the folks working on OpenTelemetry launched an effort to stabilize HTTP Semantic Conventions. In November 2023, OpenTelemetry announced that HTTP Semantic Conventions...
A Practical Guide to Debugging Browser Performance With OpenTelemetry
So you’ve taken a look at the core web vitals for your site and… it’s not looking good. You’re overwhelmed, and you don’t know what...
Observability Is About Confidence
Observability is important to understand what’s happening in production. But carving out the time to add instrumentation to a codebase is daunting, and often treated...