Automating Collection of Troubleshooting Data with Triggers: a How-To Guide

Everyone wants to be more efficient — to spend less time on the tedious things, and more time on the things that move the needle. As much as possible, if you can automate those…

Welcome (to) Home

Our latest product update features an intuitive home (landing) page that orients users with a quick, real-time view into what’s happening right now in your production systems. Home displays commonly used queries and breakdowns,…

Sustainable Operations in Complex Systems with Production Excellence

Honeycomb’s New APM Capabilities Give Engineering & DevOps Superior Production Insights and Faster Incident Resolution

PRESS RELEASE: Read on PRNewswire Modern Dev and SRE teams gain efficiencies for proactive and collaborative debugging as software updates deploy SAN FRANCISCO, May 29, 2019 – Honeycomb today announces powerful new features in its…

Dynamic Sampling by Example

Last week, Rachel published a guide describing the advantages of dynamic sampling. In it, we discussed varying sample rates to achieve a target collection rate overall, and having different sample rates for distinct kinds…

Stop Your Database From Hating You With This One Weird Trick

Let’s not bury the lede here: we use Observability-Driven Development at Honeycomb to identify and prevent DB load issues. Like every online service, we experience this familiar cycle: You start with an idea and…

The New Rules of Sampling

One of the most common questions we get at Honeycomb is about how to control costs while still achieving the level of observability needed to debug, troubleshoot, and understand what is happening in production….

Anatomy of a Cascading Failure

In Caches Are Good, Except When They Are Bad, we identified four separate problems that combined together to cause a cascading failure in our API servers. This followup post goes over them in detail,…

Not Everything Is Tech Debt, There are two stories here, and one is about risk

When In Doubt, Add More Spans: A Tale of Tracing and Testing In Production

Recently, Toshok was telling a story about the kind of thing he talks about a lot—improving the performance of some endpoint or page or other. Obviously, we spend a lot of time thinking about…

Incident Review: Caches are Good, Except When They Are Bad

Between Wednesday, April 17th and Friday, April 26th, Honeycomb had four separate periods of downtime affecting the Honeycomb API, resulting in approximately 38 minutes of total downtime. At Honeycomb, we believe that visibility into…

Metrics vs Events: A Conversation About Controlling Volume

If I’m used to metrics, how should I think about events in Honeycomb? This question cuts to the heart of how Honeycomb is different from other vendors in the APM and metrics space who…

Liz Fong-Jones on How to Secure SSH with Two Factor Authorization

A New Bee’s First Oncall

I’m Honeycomb’s newest engineer, now on my eighth week at Honeycomb. Excitingly, I did my first week of oncall two weeks ago! Almost every engineer at Honeycomb participates in oncall, and I chose to…

Tracing and Observability for Background Jobs

Illuminating the under-loved with Honeycomb Most modern web apps end up sprouting some subset of tasks that happen in the “background”, i.e., when a user is not directly waiting on the request from a…

Observations from SRECon Americas, Brooklyn, NY – March 2019

“We can know one thing: shit’s gonna fail.” Last week we participated in SRECon Americas, held across three days of intensive learning with practitioner talks, hands-on workshops, socializing, and of course vendor booths. Now…

Yes, I Test in Production (And So Do You)

Instrument Your Java App In Minutes with the Honeycomb Beeline for Java

We are excited to announce automatic instrumentation for your Java apps through our new Honeycomb Beeline for Java! This new Beeline streamlines instrumentation of HTTP events in Java Spring Boot 2 apps, and supports…

Support Your Customers More Effectively with Honeycomb

Customer success can be a serious differentiator and competitive advantage for companies today. Everyone wants to ship quality products to their customers faster, and the rise of subscription-based pricing and SaaS applications in the…

Honeycomb CEO Charity Majors on Sharing Customer Pain