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Quarterly Product Update: Better Traces, CONCURRENCY, and RATE

At Honeycomb Developer Week, I got an opportunity to walk through a couple of fun new features we’ve shipped since August and ways that we’ve been able to improve Honeycomb for you.  Hearing feedback…

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. But there’s no reason to wait until your code…

Show Your Query You Love It By Naming It

Honeycomb is all about collaboration: We believe that observability is a team sport, and we want to give you as many tools to help your team get the ball down the field (i.e., untangle…

Handle Unruly Outliers with Log Scale Heatmaps

We often say that Honeycomb helps you find a needle in your haystack. But how exactly is that done? This post walks you through when and how to visualize your data with heatmaps, creating a log scale to surface data you might otherwise miss, and using BubbleUp to quickly discover the patterns behind why certain data points are different.

Observability and the Misleading Promise of AIOps

Challenges with Implementing SLOs

A few months ago, Honeycomb released our SLO — Service Level Objective — feature to the world. We’ve written before about how to use it and some of the use scenarios. Today, I’d like…

They Aren’t Pillars, They’re Lenses

To have Observability is to have the ability to understand your system’s internal state based on signals and externally-visible output. Honeycomb’s approach to Observability is to strive toward this: every feature of the product…

Honeycomb SLO Now Generally Available: Success, Defined.

Honeycomb now offers SLOs, aka Service Level Objectives. This is the second in a set of of essays on creating SLOs from first principles. Previously, in this series, we created a derived column to…

Working Toward Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Part 1

In theory, Honeycomb is always up. Our servers run without hiccups, our user interface loads rapidly and is highly responsive, and our query engine is lightning fast. In practice, this isn’t always perfectly the…

Investigating Timeouts With Tracing Using Sentry

Tracing is one of the key tools that Honeycomb offers to make sense of data. Over the last few weeks, we’ve made a number of improvements to our tracing interface — and, put together,…

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 Loop and lets people find things they never could…

Diving into Data with Honeycomb: BubbleUp (formerly codename: Drilldown) is in Beta!

This blog miniseries talks about how to think about doing data analysis the Honeycomb way. In this episode, we announce an exciting new feature, currently in beta: BubbleUp! (formerly codenamed: Drilldown) Let’s back up…

The Core Analysis Loop, or: Heatmaps Make Analysis Better

In this blog miniseries, I’m talking about how to think about doing data analysis, the Honeycomb way. In Part I, I talked about how heatmaps help us understand how data analysis works. In Part…

Heatmaps Make Ops Better

In this blog miniseries, I’d like to talk about how to think about doing data analysis “the Honeycomb way.”  Welcome to part 1, where I cover what a heatmap is—and how using them can…