Notes from Observability Roundtables
The Velocity conference happened recently, and as part of it we (Honeycomb) hosted a sort of reverse-panel discussion, where you talked, and we listened. You may be aware that we’re in the process of…
Building Your Observability Practice with Tools that Co-exist
A lot of product marketing is about telling people to throw away what they have in favor of something entirely new. Sometimes that is the right answer–sometimes what you have has completely outlived its…
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 temps in the expo hall were welcomed by all…
Reflections on Monitorama 2019
This year was my third in a row attending (and now speaking at!) Monitorama. Because the organizers do a great job of turning introverts into extroverts for three days straight, it’s always a fun…
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 achieve success in delivering a complex service, it’s no…
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 is not directly waiting on the request from a…
Budget Planning for Next-generation APM and Observability
If you’re trying to evaluate and understand the ROI of building an observability practice and carve out a budget for it, you’re not alone. You’ve probably got some monitoring and metrics capability already, but…
Notes from On-call Adjacency
I’ve never been on-call, but I’ve been on-call adjacent for a lot of my adult life—my partners, my housemates, my friends…they’ve largely been sysadmins, in Operations, or Dev/Ops, which means I’ve experienced a lot…
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…