Working Toward Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Part 1

In theory, Honeycomb is always up. Our servers run without hiccups, our user interface loads rapidly and is highly responsive, and our query engine is lightning fast. In practice, this isn’t always perfectly the…

So You Want To Build An Observability Tool…

I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: observability is not a synonym for monitoring, and there are no three pillars. The pillars are bullshit. Briefly: monitoring is how you manage your known-unknowns,…

Working On Hitting a Release Cadence? CI/CD Observability Can Help You Get There

We recently sponsored our partner CloudBees’ conference DevOps World & JenkinsWorld in San Francisco and our message “Observe how Customers Experience Your Build” resonated well with the folks we met. Release engineers are critical…

The Path from Unstructured Logs to Observability

Are you starting out on your journey toward observability? Do you have a mandate from management, or are you a lone warrior in the matrix? From your starting point, how will you make the…

Notes from Observability Roundtables: Capabilities Deep-dive

Greetings, fellow o11ynaut! You may recall a post we shared here about two months ago that told tales of the themes we felt best represented our recent release of the Framework for an Observability…

Never Alone On Call

Does your organization have an on-call rotation? Several members of the Honeycomb engineering team recently hosted a live webcast about why they never feel alone when on-call at Honeycomb. Wait, that’s someone else’s job…

Taming A Game-Changer: Honeycomb and GraphQL at VendHQ

This guest post is from Evan Shaw, Lead Engineer at vendhq.com. GraphQL: a game-changer GraphQL is a query language for APIs. It allows you to expose all your data through a single queryable graph….

All Together Now: Better Debugging With Multiple Visualizations

“Nines don’t matter when users aren’t happy” is something you may have heard a time or two from folks here at Honeycomb. We often emphasize the fact that while your system can look healthy…

I test in prod

Understand Your AWS Cost & Usage with Honeycomb

First published in August 2019. AWS bills are notoriously complicated, and the Amazon Cost Explorer doesn’t always make it easy to understand exactly where your money is going. When we embarked on our journey…

Observability — A 3-Year Retrospective

Treading in Haunted Graveyards

Part 1: CI/CD for Infrastructure as Code At Honeycomb, we’ve often discussed the value of making software deployments early and often, and being able to understand your code as it runs in production. However,…

Notes from Observability Roundtables

The Velocity conference happened recently, and as part of it we (Honeycomb) hosted a sort of reverse-panel discussion, where you talked, and we listened. You may be aware that we’re in the process of…

Incident Review: You Can’t Deploy Binaries That Don’t Exist

Between 22:50 and 22:54 UTC on July 9, our capacity to accept traffic to api.honeycomb.io gradually diminished until all incoming requests started to fail. 8 minutes later, at 23:02, the API server was once…

Building Your Observability Practice with Tools that Co-exist

A lot of product marketing is about telling people to throw away what they have in favor of something entirely new. Sometimes that is the right answer–sometimes what you have has completely outlived its…

Velocity (& Reliability) – Two must-haves for every software engineering team

(Field notes from O’Reilly’s Velocity 2019 Show, San Jose.) It was steamy hot in San Jose during O’Reilly’s Velocity show and the normally frigid AC temps in the expo hall were welcomed by all…

Making Instrumentation Extensible

Observability-driven development requires both rich query capabilities and sufficient instrumentation in order to capture the nuances of developers’ intention and useful dimensions of cardinality. When our systems are running in containers, we need an…

Reflections on Monitorama 2019

This year was my third in a row attending (and now speaking at!) Monitorama. Because the organizers do a great job of turning introverts into extroverts for three days straight, it’s always a fun…

Investigating Timeouts With Tracing Using Sentry

Tracing is one of the key tools that Honeycomb offers to make sense of data. Over the last few weeks, we’ve made a number of improvements to our tracing interface — and, put together,…

Toward a Maturity Model for Observability

Access to observability is becoming critical to organizations shipping software, running modern infrastructures in production, and to understanding how users are experiencing their service. To achieve success in delivering a complex service, it’s no…