Observability Market Creator Honeycomb Nabs $50M in Rare Series D Funding as Economy Fuels Its Growth

The Future of Observability is Bright as Honeycomb Announces $50M in Series D Funding

The future of observability has never been more exciting, and this latest round ensures we can continue to invest—with conviction—in improving the lives of software engineering teams. We hope this is a moment of welcome change from the soul-crushing headlines plaguing the tech industry these past few months.

Generalists vs. Specialists: Figuring Out Your Path

Last month, I had the opportunity to join Jen Dary on her podcast, Be Plucky. The conversation was great, and we covered a lot of topics. We unpacked the merits and nuances of growing as a generalist and/or a specialist. I also had the chance to reflect on and share my experience in changing roles and making a few specialization shifts in my career.

Twelve-Factor Apps and Modern Observability

The Twelve-Factor App methodology is a go-to guide for people building microservices. In its time, it presented a step change in how we think about building applications that were built to scale, and be agnostic of their hosting. As applications and hosting have evolved, some of these factors also need to. Specifically, factor 11: Logs.

Ask Miss O11y: Is There a Beginner’s Guide On How to Add Observability to Your Applications?

Dear Miss O11y, I want to make my microservices more observable. Currently, I only have logs. I’ll add metrics soon, but I’m not really sure if there is a set path you follow. Is a guide of some sort, or best practice, like you have to have x kinds of metrics? I just want to know what all possibilities are out there. I am very new to this space.

How Do We Cultivate the End User Community Within Cloud-Native Projects?

The open source community talks a lot about the problem of aligning incentives. If you’re not familiar with the discourse, most of this conversation so far has centered around the most classic model of open source: the solo unpaid developer who maintains a tiny but essential library that’s holding up half the internet. For example, Denis Pushkarev, the solo maintainer of popular JavaScript library core-js, announced that he can’t continue if he’s not better compensated.

How We Define SRE Work, as a Team

The SRE team is now four engineers and a manager, and we are involved in all sorts of things across the organization, across all sorts of spheres. We are embedded in teams and we handle training, vendor management, capacity planning, cluster updates, tooling, and so on. After growing the team to a point where we could get a better grasp on our mission and identity, we decided to revisit our charter. It is a living document after all, and it was exciting for me to let other folks get their hands in it.

Feature Focus: Winter Edition ❄️

It’s been a minute since our last Feature Focus, and we have a bit of catching up to do! I’m happy to report we’ll resume monthly updates next month, but until then, please enjoy this super-sized winter digest of what we’ve been up to at Honeycomb.

Deploys Are the ✨WRONG✨ Way to Change User Experience

I’m no stranger to ranting about deploys. But there’s one thing I haven’t sufficiently ranted about yet, which is this: Deploying software is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way to go about…

Ask Miss O11y: Error: missing ‘x-honeycomb-dataset’ header

Your API Key (in the x-honeycomb-team header) tells Honeycomb where to put your data. It specifies a team and an environment. Then, Honeycomb figures out which dataset to put each event in, based on the service.name field in the event. Except…

Caring for Complex Systems: We Can Do This

When we work at it, professionals are pretty good at analysis. We can break down a simple system, look at its parts and their relations, and master it. Given enough time and teammates, we can analyze a very complicated system and fix it when it breaks. But complex systems don’t yield to analysis. We have to add another skill: sense-making.

Understanding Distributed Tracing with a Message Bus

So you’re used to debugging systems using a distributed trace, but your system is about to introduce a message queue—and that will work the same… right? Unfortunately, in a lot of implementations, this isn’t the case. In this post, we’ll talk about trace propagation (manual and OpenTelemetry), W3C tracing, and also where a trace might start and finish.

How 3 Companies Implemented Distributed Tracing for Better Insight into Their Systems

Distributed tracing enables you to monitor and observe requests as they flow through your distributed systems to understand whether these requests are behaving properly. You can compare tiny differences between multiple traces coming through your microservices-based applications every day to pinpoint areas that are affecting performance. As a result, debugging and troubleshooting are simpler and faster. No one has to guess or spend countless hours researching possible causes for issues, like you would if traditional logging methods were your only resource.

How We Manage Incident Response at Honeycomb

When I joined Honeycomb two years ago, we were entering a phase of growth where we could no longer expect to have the time to prevent or fix all issues before things got bad. All the early parts of the system needed to scale, but we would not have the bandwidth to tackle some of them graciously. We’d have to choose some fires to fight, and some to let burn.

Iterating Our Way Toward a Service Map

For a long time at Honeycomb, we envisioned using the tracing data you send us to generate a service map. If you’re unfamiliar, a service map is a graph-like visualization of your system architecture that shows all of its components and dependencies. We didn’t want it to be a static service map, though—the kind you’d view once before going “huh, neat”—and then never looking at it again. We wanted to build an actually useful, uniquely Honeycomb-y service map that could become an integral part of your team’s observability workflow.

My Time As An Employee Board Member (The Weirdest Skip-Level)

In January 2022, Honeycomb kicked off a one year experiment to have an employee sit as a voting board member on the board of directors. I became that board member in July 2022. As the experiment comes to a close, I want to share some of my reflections.

The Case for SLOs

With one key practice, it’s possible to help your engineers sleep more, reduce friction between engineering and management, and simplify your monitoring to save money. No, really. We’re here to make the case that setting service level objectives (SLOs) is the game changer your team has been looking for.

Get the Big Picture: Learn How to Visually Debug Your Systems with Service Map—Now Available in Sandbox

Honeycomb’s Service Map gives you the unique capability to filter by both services and traces so you can generate maps that isolate very specific areas of your environment. This helps you surface issues quickly and gain a granular understanding of how everything in your system works and evolves over time. And now that a Service Map scenario is available in our Sandbox, you can see it for yourself.

Autocatalytic Adoption: Harnessing Patterns to Promote Honeycomb in Your Organization

When an organization signs up for Honeycomb at the Enterprise account level, part of their support package is an assigned Technical Customer Success Manager. As one of these TCSMs, part of my responsibilities is helping a central observability team develop a strategy to help their colleagues learn how to make use of the product. At a minimum, this means making sure that they can log in, that relevant data is available, that they receive training on how to query, and perhaps that they collaborate with the rest of Honeycomb’s CS department to solve problems as they arise.

Your Data Just Got a Facelift: Introducing Honeycomb’s Data Visualization Updates

Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work modernizing Honeycomb’s data visualizations to address consistency issues, confusing displays, access to settings, and to improve their overall look and feel.