Blog

Category: Software Engineering

Dogfooding   Product Updates   Software Engineering  

Working Toward Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Part 1

In theory, Honeycomb is always up. Our servers run without hiccups, our user interface loads rapidly and is highly responsive, and our query engine is...

Debugging   Instrumentation   Operations   Software Engineering  

Working On Hitting a Release Cadence? CI/CD Observability Can Help You Get There

We recently sponsored our partner CloudBees' conference DevOps World & JenkinsWorld in San Francisco and our message “Observe how Customers Experience Your Build” resonated well...

Logging   Observability   Software Engineering  

The Path from Unstructured Logs to Observability

Are you starting out on your journey toward observability? Do you have a mandate from management, or are you a lone warrior in the matrix?...

Dogfooding   Operations   Software Engineering  

Never Alone On Call

Does your organization have an on-call rotation? Several members of the Honeycomb engineering team recently hosted a live webcast about why they never feel alone...

Debugging   Guests   Software Engineering  

Taming A Game-Changer: Honeycomb and GraphQL at VendHQ

This guest post is from Evan Shaw, Lead Engineer at vendhq.com. GraphQL: a game-changer GraphQL is a query language for APIs. It allows you to...

Observability   Software Engineering  

Velocity (& Reliability) - Two must-haves for every software engineering team

(Field notes from O’Reilly’s Velocity 2019 Show, San Jose.) It was steamy hot in San Jose during O’Reilly’s Velocity show and the normally frigid AC...

Instrumentation   Software Engineering  

Making Instrumentation Extensible

Observability-driven development requires both rich query capabilities and sufficient instrumentation in order to capture the nuances of developers' intention and useful dimensions of cardinality. When...

Observability   Operations   Software Engineering  

Toward a Maturity Model for Observability

Access to observability is becoming critical to organizations shipping software, running modern infrastructures in production, and to understanding how users are experiencing their service. To...

Instrumentation   Sampling   Software Engineering  

Dynamic Sampling by Example

Last week, Rachel published a guide describing the advantages of dynamic sampling. In it, we discussed varying sample rates to achieve a target collection rate...

Dogfooding   Software Engineering  

Anatomy of a Cascading Failure

In Caches Are Good, Except When They Are Bad, we identified four separate problems that combined together to cause a cascading failure in our API...

Dogfooding   Software Engineering   Tracing  

When In Doubt, Add More Spans: A Tale of Tracing and Testing In Production

Recently, Toshok was telling a story about the kind of thing he talks about a lot—improving the performance of some endpoint or page or other....

Dogfooding   Software Engineering  

Incident Review: Caches are Good, Except When They Are Bad

Between Wednesday, April 17th and Friday, April 26th, Honeycomb had four separate periods of downtime affecting the Honeycomb API, resulting in approximately 38 minutes of...

Debugging   Dogfooding   Operations   Software Engineering  

A New Bee's First Oncall

I'm Honeycomb's newest engineer, now on my eighth week at Honeycomb. Excitingly, I did my first week of oncall two weeks ago! Almost every engineer...

Software Engineering  

How To Talk to Your Boss About Honeycomb

At Honeycomb, we're pretty engineering-focused. We think our product is something every developer can benefit from, and we're working to build something we would want...

Debugging   Software Engineering  

Coding with Confidence - CloudBees + Honeycomb

DevOps, Observability, Continuous Delivery, Test in Production, Chaos Engineering, and Software Ownership are all major themes in software development today, but why? In an ideal...

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