Observability

February 27, 2018

Sam Stokes talks about data infrastructure on the Data Engineering Podcast

This past week, Honeycomb engineering manager Sam Stokes was interviewed on the Data Engineering Podcast, and in addition to hearing him talk a little about himself (which as far as I can tell, he…

February 22, 2018

Security Through Observability

Observability is great for understanding the ramifications of your system. In brief, massively distributed application stacks demand more sophisticated tools than traditional metrics/monitoring, because engineers must be able to ask new questions and get…

Observability

Security

grumpycat hates oncall and her coworkers

February 15, 2018

Charity Majors

Oncall and Sustainable Software Development

Yes, being on call typically and anecdotally sucks. I understand! If you’ve heard me speak, I often point out that I’ve been oncall since I was 17 years old—so I know how terrible it…

Observability

Software Engineering

February 8, 2018

Guest Blogger

Structured Logging and Your Team

This guest blog post from Anton Drukh of snyk.io is part of our series on structured logging. From 1 service to over 50 today We run a distributed engineering team at Snyk. As we…

February 1, 2018

Raising Money To Bring You More, Better Observability!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve closed an $11.5M Series A round with our friends at e.ventures, Storm, NextWorld, and Merian! It’s been a wild ride since we launched back in April of 2017….

News & Announcements

Observability

January 25, 2018

Guest Blogger

How to Use NLog for Structured Logging

We’re grateful for this guest post from Tim Wilde! You can find the source code for the examples he uses in his github repo. Strings are where data go to die There you go;…

January 16, 2018

Honeycombers at Influx Days (a late-ish report)

I finally got a chance to sit down and watch Emily and Christine’s talks from last November’s InfluxDays and right off the bat I have to apologize for not doing this sooner, because I…

Debugging

Observability

December 19, 2017

Rachel Fong

New Custom Regex Log Ingestion

Unstructured text logs are so last decade, but sometimes you have to deal with them because they aren’t actually all that prehistoric in human years…or you just need us to ingest formats we don’t…

November 14, 2017

Best Practices for Observability

Observability has been getting a lot of attention recently. What started out as a fairly obscure technical term, dragged from the dusty annals of control theory, has been generating attention for one simple reason:…

November 2, 2017

Instrumenting browser page loads at Honeycomb

Update: We now have a browser js guide with practical tips on how to send browser data to Honeycomb. “Nines don’t matter if users aren’t happy” – my boss As web applications have grown…

Instrumentation

Observability

October 24, 2017

Charity Majors

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…

Metrics

Observability

October 18, 2017

Charity Majors

Bitten by a Kafka Bug – Postmortem

Dearest honeycombers, Yesterday, on Tuesday, Oct 17th, we experienced a partial service outage for some customers, and a small amount of data was dropped during ingestion (not any previously stored data). In terms of…

Debugging

Observability

October 17, 2017

Eben Freeman

You Could Have Invented Structured Logging

Sometimes we hear from folks who are a little bit intimidated by the notion of structured logging. Some common issues: There’s no approachable library for structured logging in my language. My logging today is…

October 3, 2017

How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 6: Instrumenting a Production Service

This post continues our dogfooding series from How Honeycomb Uses Honeycomb, Part 5: The Correlations Are Not What They Seem. In a recent blog post, I talked about what sorts of things should go…

September 26, 2017

Istio, Envoy, and Honeycomb

Here at the hive, we’re exceedingly excited about the emerging future of the “service mesh.” After deploying a sidecar proxy such as Envoy, a service mesh will unlock a number of infrastructure benefits such…

Connectors & Integrations

Observability

August 31, 2017

Nathan LeClaire

Using the Golang Pprof Web UI to Debug Memory Usage

Golang as an Observability Tool Go, for good reason, has become an incredibly popular language for everything from web applications to DevOps tools. We lean on Golang heavily here at Honeycomb, and naturally we…

Connectors & Integrations

Observability

Product Updates

August 22, 2017

Charity Majors

Observability: What’s in a Name?

“Is observability just monitoring with another name?” “Observability: we changed the word because developers don’t like monitoring.” There’s been a lot of hilarious snark about this lately. Which is great, who doesn’t love A+…

August 8, 2017

Event Foo: What Should I Add to an Event?

When we’re talking with people about how they should start using Honeycomb, many ask for guidance about what should go into an event. Though there are longer posts on this blog about what it…

Events

Observability

August 1, 2017

Rachel Perkins

Event Foo: Building Better Events

This post from new Honeycomber Rachel Perkins is the seventh in our series on the how, why, and what of events. An event is a record of something that your system did. A line…

July 25, 2017

Introducing the New Honeycomb Quick Start

Today we are pleased to announce the release of the new Honeycomb Quick Start to help you in your quest to become an observability master. In case you’re unfamiliar, Honeycomb is a tool to…

Observability

Product Updates