A Culture of Observability Helps Engineers Hit the Spot (Instance)
At Honeycomb, we’re big fans of AWS Spot Instances. During a recent bill reduction exercise, we found significant savings in running our API service on Spot, and now look to use it wherever we…
So You Want To Build An Observability Tool…
I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: observability is not a synonym for monitoring, and there are no three pillars. The pillars are bullshit. Briefly: monitoring is how you manage your known-unknowns,…
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? From your starting point, how will you make the…
Notes from Observability Roundtables: Capabilities Deep-dive
Greetings, fellow o11ynaut! You may recall a post we shared here about two months ago that told tales of the themes we felt best represented our recent release of the Framework for an Observability…
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…