Is it Time to Version Observability? Signs Point to Yes
In 2016, we at Honeycomb first borrowed the term “observability” from the wikipedia entry for control systems observability, where it is a measure of your...
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Stop Your Database From Hating You With This One Weird Trick
Let's not bury the lede here: we use Observability-Driven Development at Honeycomb to identify and prevent DB load issues. Like every online service, we experience...
The New Rules of Sampling
One of the most common questions we get at Honeycomb is about how to control costs while still achieving the level of observability needed to...
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...
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....
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...
Metrics vs Events: A Conversation About Controlling Volume
If I'm used to metrics, how should I think about events in Honeycomb? This question cuts to the heart of how Honeycomb is different from...
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...
Tracing and Observability for Background Jobs
Illuminating the under-loved with Honeycomb Most modern web apps end up sprouting some subset of tasks that happen in the “background”, i.e., when a user...
Observations from SRECon Americas, Brooklyn, NY - March 2019
"We can know one thing: shit's gonna fail." Last week we participated in SRECon Americas, held across three days of intensive learning with practitioner talks,...
Instrument Your Java App In Minutes with the Honeycomb Beeline for Java
We are excited to announce automatic instrumentation for your Java apps through our new Honeycomb Beeline for Java! This new Beeline streamlines instrumentation of HTTP...
Support Your Customers More Effectively with Honeycomb
Customer success can be a serious differentiator and competitive advantage for companies today. Everyone wants to ship quality products to their customers faster, and the...
BubbleUp Meets Tracing (and Other Odd-shaped Data)
A few weeks ago, BubbleUp came out of Beta. We've been getting fantastic user feedback on how BubbleUp helps users speed through the Core Analysis...