What the Hell is Activity Anyway?

Dear Miss O11y, I use .NET and I keep seeing something called `Activity` but in OpenTelemetry there is only talk about “Span” and “Trace,” why? And what should I be using? Kthxbye This is…

Ask Miss O11y: As a developer, how can I try out observability?

Dear Miss o11y, What’s the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for something else? Observability doesn’t have to be a big,…

Service Level Objectives as Code: Terraforming Honeycomb SLOs

In March, we announced official support for a Honeycomb Terraform Provider. Today, we’re announcing additional support for managing Honeycomb Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with Terraform. This furthers Honeycomb’s support for configuration as code and…

Engineering Levels at Honeycomb: Avoiding the Scope Trap

It has been seven years since Rent the Runway posted their engineering ladder, kicking off a veritable trend of engineering teams open sourcing their ladders. Interestingly, nearly all of them seem to have coalesced…

Tracking On-Call Health

If you have an on-call rotation, you want it to be a healthy one. But this is sort of hard to measure because it has very abstract qualities to it. For example,  are you…

The Present and Future of Arm and AWS Graviton at Honeycomb

As many of you may have read, Amazon has released C7g instances powered by the highly anticipated AWS Graviton3 Processors. As we shared at re:Invent 2021, we had the chance to take a little…

Ask Miss O11y: Is the OpenTelemetry Collector useful?

Dear Miss O11y, I’ve been told I need to use the OpenTelemetry Collector, but I have no idea what it is, or why I need it? Should I be using it? What value does…

Quickly Turn ALB/ELB Status Codes into an Issue-Seeking Heatmap

More often than not, as developers, when we get a report that a large customer is hitting 500 errors, there’s a flurry of activity. What’s wrong? Is something deeply broken? So you start digging…

Ask Miss O11y: Not Your Aunt’s Tracing

Dear Miss O11y, How is modern observability using tracing, such as Honeycomb, different from the previous distributed tracing software I’m familiar with, like Dapper, at my company? I haven’t really been able to wrap…

Honeycomb Authors O’Reilly Book on Observability Engineering

✨ The ✨ Book✨ Is ✨ Done✨

The book is done. The book is FINISHED. There will be no more writing of the book! Holy macaroni. If you think you might be sensing just a SMIDGE of relief, you wouldn’t be…

Ask Miss O11y: When should you delete instrumentation?

When do you delete instrumentation? You delete instrumentation when you delete code. Other than that, if you’re doing things right: almost never. One of the best things about honeycomb is that it completely transforms…

Observability for New Teams: Part 1

Any significant shift in an organization’s software engineering culture has the potential to feel tectonic, and observability (o11y for short)—or more specifically, Observability Driven Development—is no different. Leaning into observability, which calls for tool-enhanced…

Ask Miss O11y: Baggage in OTel

Miss O11y is delighted to welcome our newest band member: Martin Thwaites! Martin has been a member of the Honeycomb user community practically since its inception. He is a UK-based consultant who specializes in…

Why UX Designers Don’t Feel Valued—and Why This Is a Problem for Your Business

It’s time we had a real conversation about why UX designers everywhere are still unhappy, why that elusive “seat at the table” feels so impossibly out of reach to so many (even at companies…

Ask Miss O11y: Logs vs. Traces

Tracing looks like a lot of work. We already have logs. Why bother adding traces? Ah, good question!  TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show connection, performance, concurrency, and causality. Logs are the original…

The power of asking questions

This is a guest post by Vlad Ionescu. Vlad Ionescu jokingly describes himself as a “Professional mistake avoider” which is a better way of saying “Independent Consultant.” His work focuses on getting companies to…

OnCallogy Sessions

Being on call is challenging. It’s signing up to be operating complex services in a totally interruptible manner, at all hours of the day or night, with limited context.  It’s therefore critical to have…

Ask Miss O11y: Pls ELI5 TLAs like PRO, SRE, and SLOs!

Dear Miss O11y, I’m confused by all of the Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) that have started popping up lately. This week, I got an email from Honeycomb saying that the “PRO” plan now has…

Top 5 Takeaways From GDC 2022

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is a yearly event that brings together leading brands in the gaming industry to talk about trends in development and showcase new features and releases. One of the cool…