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 debug, troubleshoot, and understand what is happening in production….
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 other vendors in the APM and metrics space who…
How Does Honeycomb Compare to Metrics, Log Management, and APM Tools?
At Honeycomb, we are frequently asked how we compare to what else is out there. Do these other tools offer observability? Do I need them all? What’s important? Metrics? Logs? What’s the best way…
How Much Should My Observability Stack Cost?
What should one pay for observability? What should your observability stack cost? What should be in your observability stack? How much observability is enough? How much is too much, or is there such a…
Honeycomb vs Elastic Stack: It’s about priorities
If you’ve been paying attention, you know that although collecting and reviewing metrics and logs is a core part of running a stable and successful service, access to raw events and the ability to…
The Price is Right
Here at the hive, we’re working on something that isn’t code or new features(!), but is a big part of our business notwithstanding: figuring out the best way to help people understand how we…
How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb Part 8: A Bee’s Life
This post continues our dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 7: Measure twice, cut once: How we made our queries 50% faster…with data. To understand how Honeycomb uses Honeycomb at a high…
Metrics: not the observability droids you’re looking for
I went to Monitorama last year for my first time. It was great; I had a terrific time. But I couldn’t help but notice how speaker after speaker in talk after talk spent time…
Reflections on Monitorama 2017: From the Metrics We Love to the Events We Need
There were a bunch of talks at Monitorama 2017 that could be summed up as “Let me show you how I built this behemoth of a metrics system, so I could safely handle billions…
Instrumenting High Volume Services: Part 2
This is the second of three posts focusing on sampling as a part of your toolbox for handling services that generate large amounts of instrumentation data. The first one was an introduction to sampling….