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Service Map Announcement
October 26, 2022
Nick Rycar

Nick Rycar

Introducing Honeycomb Service Map: A Dynamic, Interactive, and Actionable View of Your Entire Environment

Today, we’re announcing the launch of Honeycomb Service Map. This isn’t your grandparent’s version of a service map. This feature reimagines what it is that you want to know or investigate when looking at visualizations of how your services communicate with one another.

News & Announcements
Product Updates
Announcing New GitHub Actions + Honeycomb Integration Guide
October 25, 2022
George Miranda

George Miranda

Announcing New GitHub Actions + Honeycomb Integration Guide

If you build or maintain code in GitHub, the Honeycomb Buildevents Action can help you optimize the performance of your build pipelines in GitHub Actions. This blog introduces you to the gha-buildevents Action and a new hands-on quickstart guide that will show you the inner workings of GitHub Actions workflows, the buildevents tool, and the Honeycomb UI.

Connectors & Integrations
Tutorials
Import Datadog Traces Into Honeycomb
October 24, 2022
Michael Sickles

Michael Sickles

Import Datadog Traces Into Honeycomb

Getting existing telemetry into Honeycomb just got easier! With the release of the Datadog APM Receiver, you can send your Datadog traces to the OpenTelemetry Collector, and from there, to any OpenTelemetry-compatible endpoint.

OpenTelemetry
AWS PrivateLink Support Image
October 21, 2022
Matt Ransford

Matt Ransford

Introducing PrivateLink Support for Enterprise

Network topology can get very complicated in the cloud, especially when you’re sending data to external SaaS providers. You will likely need to configure gateways and firewalls and keep close tabs on those points of egress. However, if your infrastructure exists within AWS, there’s a much simpler way and that’s through an AWS PrivateLink endpoint.

Connectors & Integrations
Iterating on an OpenTelemetry Collector Deployment in Kubernetes
October 20, 2022
Jessica Kerr

Jessica Kerr

Iterating on an OpenTelemetry Collector Deployment in Kubernetes

When you want to direct your observability data in a uniform fashion, you want to run an OpenTelemetry collector. If you have a Kubernetes cluster handy, that’s a useful place to run it. Helm is a quick way to get it running in Kubernetes; it encapsulates all the YAML object definitions that you need. OpenTelemetry publishes a Helm chart for the collector.

OpenTelemetry
Find and Fix Bottlenecks in Your Gradle Builds With OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb
October 19, 2022
Craig Atkinson

Craig Atkinson

Find and Fix Bottlenecks in Your Gradle Builds With OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb

Today, I’d like to share with you a new community-contributed integration that helps you optimize and debug your Gradle builds. This new Gradle plugin is available today, is free to use, and you can use it immediately with a free Honeycomb account.

Connectors & Integrations
Incident Review: Shepherd Cache Delays
October 18, 2022
Fred Hebert

Fred Hebert

Incident Review: Shepherd Cache Delays

In this incident review, we’ll cover the outage from September 8th, 2022, where our ingest system went down repeatedly and caused interruptions for over eight hours. We will first cover the background behind the incident with a high-level view of the relevant architecture, how we tried to investigate and fix the system, and finally, we’ll go over some meaningful elements that surfaced from our incident review process.

Debugging
Debugging Just Got Faster and Easier With New Enhancements to BubbleUp
October 17, 2022
Fahim Zaman

Fahim Zaman

Debugging Just Got Faster and Easier With New Enhancements to BubbleUp

We’re thrilled to share that we’ve made significant enhancements to BubbleUp that will enable users to BubbleUp from more parts of the Honeycomb UI beyond heatmaps. This means users can leverage BubbleUp’s powerful pattern detection on specific groups of users or conditions beyond numeric values, such as users from a particular region, using specific devices or operating systems that are experiencing a particular error message—or are using a unique part of your application, such as a discount code. This ability dramatically accelerates the debugging workflow because you can investigate so many more combinations of factors by asking a wider range of questions about your data to uncover underlying issues in way fewer steps, all from the same UI.

Debugging
Product Updates
Get More Out of OpenTelemetry With Honeycomb’s Latest Updates
October 17, 2022
Phillip Carter

Phillip Carter

Get More Out of OpenTelemetry With Honeycomb’s Latest Updates

Just a few short months ago, we talked about a bunch of updates to Honeycomb’s support for OpenTelemetry. To the surprise of no one, we’ve got more updates to share!

OpenTelemetry
Product Updates
Broader Observability Ecosystem of Cloud-Native, DevOps, and SRE
October 13, 2022
Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones

Authors’ Cut—Gear up! Exploring the Broader Observability Ecosystem of Cloud-Native, DevOps, and SRE

You know that old adage about not seeing the forest for the trees? In our Authors’ Cut series, we’ve been looking at the trees that make up the observability forest—among them, CI/CD pipelines, Service Level Objectives, and the Core Analysis Loop. Today, I’d like to step back and take a look at how observability fits into the broader technical and cultural shifts in technology: cloud-native, DevOps, and SRE.

Observability
Honeycomb Welcomes New Field CTO
October 12, 2022
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

Honeycomb Welcomes New Field CTO

I am thrilled to share with you that Honeycomb now has a Field CTO: our very own Liz Fong-Jones.

News & Announcements
The Business Value of Observability
October 11, 2022
George Miranda

George Miranda

Authors’ Cut—Shifting Cultural Gears: How to Show the Business Value of Observability

How do you solve the people and culture problems that are necessary in making the shift to adopt observability practices? And once you instill those changes, how do measure the benefits?

Featured
Observability
New Honeycomb Integration With ServiceNow
October 7, 2022
Matt Morris

Matt Morris

New Honeycomb Integration With ServiceNow

Today, I’d like to tell you about a new community-contributed integration that connects Honeycomb to your ServiceNow workflows. My new integration reimagines what’s possible when connecting observability tools with ITSM systems. This post explains how it works and how to get started with it.

Connectors & Integrations
Operations
Feature Focus September 2022
October 3, 2022
Nick Rycar

Nick Rycar

Feature Focus: September 2022

Feature Focus: September 2022. Here’s a look at improvements we’ve made to Honeycomb in September, including: updates to a buuunch of APIs, new integrations, and Refinery upgrades.

Product Updates
The Future of Ops Is Platform Engineering
September 30, 2022
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

The Future of Ops Is Platform Engineering

In the beginning, there were people who wrote and ran software. At some point, we spun away ops skills from dev skills into two different professions, but that turned out to be a ginormous mistake, so along came DevOps to reunify them. Nowadays, ops as an independent profession is in the process of fading out. Companies are spinning down their ops teams left and right. Engineers who formerly identified as sysadmins or operations have turned into DevOps engineers, and soon there will just be “software people” again. This is the way of things.

Operations
Software Engineering
Getting Started with OpenTelemetry
September 28, 2022
Phillip Carter

Phillip Carter

Getting Started with OpenTelemetry: Three Companies Check Into OTel Observability

Learn how Jimdo, Upgrade, and Campspot benefited from OpenTelemetry, whether in improved performance, or by avoiding vendor lock-in.

Observability
OpenTelemetry
Sense and Signals
September 27, 2022
Nick Travaglini

Nick Travaglini

Sense and Signals

Part of understanding a complex, distributed software system as a socio-technical system means taking seriously that the signals the stewards receive aren’t just chatter.

Observability
Ask Miss O11y – Martin – Availability Checks
September 22, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

How Do I Do Availability Checks in Honeycomb?

Let’s dig into what we mean by an Availability Check and how that maps to observability, tracing, and supporting production systems.

Ask Miss O11y
Observability
OpenTelemetry Collector and Azure Container Apps
September 14, 2022
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Running the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps

In this post, we’ll look at how to host the OpenTelemetry Collector in Azure Container Apps. There are a few gotchas with how it’s deployed, so hopefully this will stop you from hitting the same issues.

OpenTelemetry
SLO Incident Review
September 9, 2022
Fred Hebert

Fred Hebert

Incident Review: Working as Designed, But Still Failing

A few weeks ago, we had a couple of incidents that ended up impacting query performance and alerting via triggers and SLOs. These incidents were notable because of how challenging their investigation turned out to be. In this review, we’ll go over interesting patterns associated with growth, and complex systems—and how these patterns challenged our operations.

Debugging