Get full-fidelity visibility without full-volume costs with our Telemetry Pipeline update.Learn more

Explore Blog

Building a Simple Synthetic Monitor with OpenTelemetry
April 28, 2025
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Building a Simple Synthetic Monitor With OpenTelemetry

In this post, I’ll cover what synthetic monitoring is and show an example of how you can create a simple monitor using OpenTelemetry, .NET, and an Azure function. If you only want to see how it’s built, skip ahead to building a synthetic monitor.

OpenTelemetry
How Much Should I Be Spending On Observability?
April 23, 2025
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

How Much Should I Be Spending On Observability?

In last week’s piece, we talked about some of the factors that are driving costs up, both good and bad, and about whether your observability bill is (or should be) more of a cost center or an investment. In this piece, I’m going to talk more in depth about cost drivers and levers of control.

Observability
Sampling
New Feature: Manage Your session.id in Honeycomb’s Web SDK
April 22, 2025
Ken Rimple

Ken Rimple

New Feature: Manage Your session.id in Honeycomb’s Web SDK

The session.id field is special in Honeycomb for Frontend Observability. It’s a default option for filtering and grouping, and it’s the basis for session timeline analysis (in Early Access). Now you can control how session.id is set.

Frontend
OpenTelemetry
Data Strategy for SREs and Observability Teams
April 21, 2025
Irving Popovetsky

Irving Popovetsky

Data Strategy for SREs and Observability Teams

The idea that telemetry data needs to be managed, or needs a strategy, draws a lot of inspiration from the data world (as in, BI and Data Engineering). Your company most likely has a data team that manages the data warehouse(s), data pipelines, data sources, and reporting tools. These teams are also constantly balancing costs with their user and stakeholder needs, usability, data retention, granularity, etc. Sound familiar? That’s because if you’re working on observability data, these teams are at least several years ahead of you in addressing these tradeoffs and considerations—and can teach us quite a lot.

Observability
Sampling
Software Engineering
How Much Should I Be Spending On Observability?
April 16, 2025
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

How Much Should I Be Spending On Observability?

In 2018, I dashed off a punchy little blog post in which I observed that teams with good observability seemed to spend around ~20-30% of their infra bill to get it. I also noted this was based on absolutely no data, only my own experiences and a bunch of anecdotes, heavily weighted towards startups and the mid-market tech sector.

Observability
MCP, Easy as 1-2-3?
April 14, 2025
Austin Parker

Austin Parker

MCP, Easy as 1-2-3?

Seems like you can’t throw a rock without hitting an announcement about a Model Context Protocol server release from your favorite application or developer tool. While I could just write a couple hundred words about the Honeycomb MCP server, I’d rather walk you through the experience of building it, some of the challenges and successes we’ve seen while building and using it, and talk through what’s next. It should be pretty exciting, so strap in!

LLMs
Honeycomb Acquires Grit: A Strategic Investment in Pragmatic AI and Customer Value
April 10, 2025
Christine Yen

Christine Yen

Honeycomb Acquires Grit: A Strategic Investment in Pragmatic AI and Customer Value

We’re excited to share that Honeycomb has completed our first-ever acquisition: we’re joining forces with Grit, bringing aboard not only a strong team but also compelling technology that supercharges our ability to deliver on our mission: to bring observability to every software engineer.

LLMs
News & Announcements
Observability: It’s Every Engineer’s Job, Not Just Ops’ Problem
April 9, 2025
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Observability: It’s Every Engineer’s Job, Not Just Ops’ Problem

Observability is way more about software engineering than it is about operations. Operators are users of observability data for monitoring and alerting on systems. They’ll use that telemetry data to scale systems, or potentially debug the outside of applications. In contrast, software engineers are creators, designers, and users of observability data, and where they use that data is much wider than that of pure operators of production systems.

Observability
Teams & Collaboration
How Does ‘Vibe Coding’ Work With Observability?
April 7, 2025
Austin Parker

Austin Parker

How Does ‘Vibe Coding’ Work With Observability?

You can’t throw a rock without hitting an online discussion about ‘vibe coding,’ so I figured I’d add some signal to the noise and discuss how I’ve been using AI-driven coding tools with observability platforms like Honeycomb over the past six months. This isn’t an exhaustive guide, and not everything I say is going to be useful to everyone—but hopefully it will clear up some common misconceptions and help folks out.

LLMs
Software Engineering
Blog-What_Is_A_Otel_Pipeline-FI
April 4, 2025
Mike Terhar

Mike Terhar

What Is a Telemetry Pipeline?

In a simple deployment, an application will emit spans, metrics, and logs which will be sent to api.honeycomb.io and show up in charts. This works for small projects and organizations that do not control outbound access from their servers. If your organization has more components, network rules, or requires tail-based sampling, you’ll need to create a telemetry pipeline.

Observability
OpenTelemetry
The Buzz on Honeycomb Academy
April 3, 2025
David Marchante

David Marchante

The Buzz on Honeycomb Academy

At Honeycomb, we believe that observability should be accessible, effective, and transformative. That’s why our customer education team is thrilled to introduce Honeycomb Academy, a learning hub designed to help our customers of all experience levels master observability, OpenTelemetry, and the Honeycomb platform.

Best Practices
News & Announcements
Enabling Design System Observability Using Honeycomb
March 31, 2025
Grady Salzman

Grady Salzman

Enabling Design System Observability Using Honeycomb

At Honeycomb, we’re actively growing our design system, Lattice, to ensure accessibility, optimize performance, and establish consistent design patterns across our product. One metric we use to measure Lattice is the adoption of components across the product. Adoption is about understanding how, where, and why they’re being used.

Observability
Teams & Collaboration
Better CloudWatch Metrics in Honeycomb with the OpenTelemetry Collector
March 26, 2025
Davin Taddeo

Davin Taddeo

Better CloudWatch Metrics in Honeycomb with the OpenTelemetry Collector

CloudWatch metrics can be a very useful source of information for a number of AWS services that don’t produce telemetry as well as instrumented code. There are also a number of useful metrics for non-web-request based functions, like metrics on concurrent database requests. We use them at Honeycomb to get statistics on load balancers and RDS instances. The Amazon Data Firehose is able to export directly to Honeycomb as well, which makes getting the data into Honeycomb straightforward.

Metrics
OpenTelemetry
AI for Software Engineering is Just Another “Paradigm Shift”
March 24, 2025
Ken Rimple

Ken Rimple

AI for Software Engineering is Just Another “Paradigm Shift”

How many of you started with technologies you still use exactly the same way today? Even if you’re a master Lisp/Clojure developer, you’ve still evolved, right? I should really get my head around those parentheses some day.

LLMs
Software Engineering
Building AI-Ready Infrastructure for the Enterprise
March 20, 2025
Kate Guarente-Smith

Kate Guarente-Smith

Building AI-Ready Infrastructure for the Enterprise

Last week marked the inaugural HumanX conference, a convening of leaders, technologists, policy makers, and media, all brought together to discuss the state of AI and its potential impact on the future of software, business, and society.

Conferences & Meetups
LLMs
Software Engineering
So, What’s the Difference Between Observability and Monitoring?
March 17, 2025
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

So, What’s the Difference Between Observability and Monitoring?

Observability and monitoring are not about gathering different data—they differ in their purpose, but share the same data.

Monitoring
Observability
LLMs Are Weird Computers
March 13, 2025
Phillip Carter

Phillip Carter

LLMs Are Weird Computers

The common definition of a computer is a programmable machine that stores, retrieves, and processes data. I would argue that ChatGPT already fits this definition, as you can control how it responds with prompts (programs), it can store data you pass it (memory), it can search that data to generate a response (RAG), and it can process inputs to produce a response (inference).

LLMs
Generating Calculated Fields From Natural Language
March 10, 2025
Molly Stamos

Molly Stamos

Generating Calculated Fields From Natural Language

f you’ve been using Honeycomb for a bit, you know that Calculated Fields (otherwise known as derived columns) are a powerful way to transform your events to a format that’s easier to query and understand. However, they use a lisp-esque language that can be difficult to read and a pain to write.

LLMs
Does AI Help Write Better Software, or Just… More Code?
March 5, 2025
Fahim Zaman

Fahim Zaman

Does AI Help Write Better Software, or Just… More Code?

As software teams race to integrate AI into their development workflows, we need to ask ourselves: are AI-powered tools actually making software better?

LLMs
Software Engineering
How I Code With LLMs These Days
March 4, 2025
Phillip Carter

Phillip Carter

How I Code With LLMs These Days

I first started using AI coding assistants in early 2021, with an invite code from a friend who worked on the original GitHub Copilot team. Back then, the workflow was just single-line tab completion, but you could also guide code generation with comments and it’d try its best to implement what you want.

LLMs
Software Engineering