We Learn Systems by Changing Them
In the social world, there is no outside: we participate in the systems we study. I’ve noticed this in code: when I come to an...
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...
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...
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...
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...
BeginSpan is the New Printf: Observability in the Developer Workflow
Observability is a great way to understand how your system is operating in production, diagnose errors when systems fail, and find subtle gaps in logic....
Tracing Makes Concurrency Bugs Easy to Spot
Today, I found a concurrency bug before I noticed it. Like, it was subtle, and so I wasn’t quite sure I saw it—maybe I hadn’t...
Ask Miss O11y: Tracing Is for Async, Too
I have a good sense of how to use traces to understand my system’s behavior within request/response cycles. What about multi-request processes? What about async...
Vendor Switching With OpenTelemetry (OTel)
You might already know that OpenTelemetry is the future of instrumentation. It's an open-source and vendor-neutral instrumentation framework that frees you from the trap of...
How Slack Transformed Their CI With Tracing
Slack experienced meteoric growth between 2017 and 2020—but that level of growth came with growing pains. In his talk at the 2021 o11ycon+hnycon, Frank Chen...
Uniting Tracing and Logs With OpenTelemetry Span Events
The current landscape of what our customers are dealing with in monitoring and observability can be a bit of a mess. For one thing, there...
Mix & Match! Tracing Header Interoperability Between OpenTelemetry and Beelines
We’ve released support for tracing header interoperability in all of our Beelines. This means you can now mix and match distributed services instrumented with Beelines...
Logs and Traces: Two Houses Unalike in Dignity
With Honeycomb, the engineering team at IMO was able to find hidden architectural issues that were previously obscured in their logs, generating new insights that...
Unpacking Events: All the Better to Observe
At Honeycomb, we believe events are the building blocks for observability. What exactly is an event? What does that mean for your team’s observability journey?...
"Hot-take" on 3 Popular Open Source Tools & The Observability Landscape
New eGuide takes a closer look at Prometheus, ELK and Jaeger: Open source tooling has its benefits. No licensing costs and you’re free to download,...