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AI: Where in the Loop Should Humans Go?
March 3, 2025
Fred Hebert

Fred Hebert

AI: Where in the Loop Should Humans Go?

AI is everywhere, and its impressive claims are leading to rapid adoption. At this stage, I’d qualify it as charismatic technology—something that under-delivers on what it promises, but promises so much that the industry still leverages it because we believe it will eventually deliver on these claims.

Best Practices
LLMs
OpenTelemetry Metrics Explained: A Guide for Engineers
February 26, 2025
Rox Williams

Rox Williams

OpenTelemetry Metrics Explained: A Guide for Engineers

OpenTelemetry (often abbreviated as OTel) is the golden standard observability framework, allowing users to collect, process, and export telemetry data from their systems. OpenTelemetry’s framework is organized into distinct signals, each offering an aspect of observability. Among these signals, OpenTelemetry metrics are crucial in helping engineers understand their systems. In this blog, we’ll explore OpenTelemetry metrics, how they work, and how to use them effectively to ensure your systems and applications run smoothly.

Metrics
OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry Is Not Three Pillars
February 24, 2025
Austin Parker

Austin Parker

OpenTelemetry Is Not “Three Pillars”

OpenTelemetry is a big, big project. It’s so big, in fact, that it can be hard to know what part you’re talking about when you’re talking about it! One particular critique I’ve seen going around recently, though, is about how OpenTelemetry is just ‘three pillars’ all over again. Reader, this could not be further from the truth, and I want to spend some time on why.

OpenTelemetry
Slicing Up—and Iterating on—SLOs
February 19, 2025
Fred Hebert

Fred Hebert

Slicing Up—and Iterating on—SLOs

One of the main pieces of advice about Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is that they should focus on the user experience. Invariably, this leads to people further down the stack asking, “But how do I make my work fit the users?”—to which the answer is to redefine what we mean by “user.” In the end, a user is anyone who uses whatever it is you’re measuring.

Service Level Objectives
Teams & Collaboration
Wiring Up a Next.js Self-Hosted Application to Honeycomb
February 17, 2025
Ken Rimple

Ken Rimple

Wiring Up a Next.js Self-Hosted Application to Honeycomb

This blog post will get you started ingesting your Next.js application’s telemetry into Honeycomb. I’ll show you the configuration steps, how to view your traces in Honeycomb, and even how to explore your frontend React telemetry with our Frontend Observability Web Launchpad.

Frontend
Preempting Problems in a Sociotechnical System
February 13, 2025
Nick Travaglini

Nick Travaglini

Preempting Problems in a Sociotechnical System

Here at Honeycomb, we emphasize that organizations are sociotechnical systems. At a high level, that means that “wet-brained” people and the stuff they do is irreducible to “dry-brained” computations. That cashes out as the inability to ultimately remove or replace people in organizations with computers, in spite of what artificial general intelligence (AGI) ideologues would have you believe. The best that such artifacts can do is “relieve labor-intensive toil,” as my colleagues Charity and Phillip put it.

Culture
Teams & Collaboration
Stop Logging the Request Body!
February 10, 2025
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Stop Logging the Request Body!

With more and more people adopting OpenTelemetry and specifically using the tracing signal, I’ve seen an uptick in people wanting to add the entire request and response body as an attribute. This isn’t ideal, as it wasn’t when people were logging the body as text logs. In this blog post, I’ll explain why this is a bad idea, what are the pitfalls, and more importantly, what you should do instead.

Logging
Frontend Monitoring: Deliver Seamless and Performant User Experiences
February 6, 2025
Rox Williams

Rox Williams

Frontend Monitoring: Deliver Seamless and Performant User Experiences

In this blog, we’ll share the fundamentals of frontend monitoring, including what you need to know about performance measurement and strategies for staying ahead of monitoring challenges to deliver high-performing, user-centric applications.

Frontend
Why Observability 2.0 Is Such a Gamechanger
February 5, 2025
Erwin van der Koogh

Erwin van der Koogh

Why Observability 2.0 Is Such a Gamechanger

One of the hardest parts of my job is to get people to appreciate just how much of a difference Honeycomb/observability 2.0 is compared to their current way of working. It’s not just a small step up or a linear improvement. Rather, it’s an entire step change in the way that you write, deploy, and operate software for your customers.

Observability
Restructuring How We Think About Alerts
January 28, 2025
Fred Hebert

Fred Hebert

Restructuring How We Think About Alerts

Back in Alerts Are Fundamentally Messy, I made the point that the events we monitor are often fuzzy and uncertain. To make a distinction between what is valid or invalid as an event, context is needed, and since context doesn’t tend to exist within a metric, humans go around and validate alerts to add this context. As such, humans are part of the alerting loop, and alerts can be framed as devices used to redirect our attention.

Incident Response
Operations
The Future and The Floor: Framing Investments for Growth
January 27, 2025
Hannah Henderson

Hannah Henderson

The Future and The Floor: Framing Investments for Growth

There are a limited number of investments that a team can make in any given year and it can be daunting to choose the “right” ones. To simplify our options, I keep coming back to “the future” and “the floor.”

Best Practices
Software Engineering
Welcome Jessica Nunn To Our Board of Directors!
January 24, 2025
Charity Majors

Charity Majors

Welcome Jessica Nunn To Our Board of Directors!

Ever since January of 2022, we have had an employee representative seated on our board of directors. Paul Osman was the first employee to hold the position; when he left the company, Alyson van Hardenburg took over and filled out the rest of his time; we then nominated her to serve another year in that seat.

News & Announcements
Configuring a React Application with Honeycomb For Frontend Observability
January 23, 2025
Ken Rimple

Ken Rimple

Configuring a React Application with Honeycomb For Frontend Observability

In this article, I’ll lay out approaches for wiring Honeycomb to client-side only React so you can ingest your telemetry into Honeycomb and take advantage of the Web Launchpad. This telemetry sends semantically-named attributes, and can be used with any OTLP destination.

Frontend
Tracing Refinery
January 22, 2025
Tyler Helmuth

Tyler Helmuth

Tracing Refinery

We recently released Refinery 2.9, which came with great performance improvements. Reading through the release notes, I felt the need to write a piece on this improvement, as it’s quite important but easy to overlook: collect loop taking too long. This is the story of how we used distributed tracing to find the slowdown in this loop.

Sampling
Tracing
AIOps: Prove It!
January 21, 2025
Lex Neva

Lex Neva

AIOps: Prove It!

I’ve read a steadily increasing stream of articles about using AI in SRE, and I have yet to find one that inspires my trust. Each article makes impressive claims about the capabilities of AI and the way it can be applied to SRE tasks, but the vast majority are light on details.

LLMs
Implementing High-Cardinality Instrumentation in Frontend Apps
January 16, 2025
Winston Hearn

Winston Hearn

Implementing High-Cardinality Instrumentation in Frontend Apps

In speaking with frontend engineers this past year, I realized that understanding the power of wide events is a big mental shift. We’re used to having metrics—think the P70 of your Core Web Vitals, or the average Time To First Byte (TTFB). These are high-level numbers that give us some insight into the average user experience on your apps—but wide events help us do so much more than metrics can ever dream of.

Frontend
The Most Important Developer Productivity Metric
January 14, 2025
Liz Fong-Jones

Liz Fong-Jones

The Most Important Developer Productivity Metric

At Honeycomb, we believe in ensuring an awesome developer experience for our own engineering teams; it’s the only way that we can compete with companies that have way more engineers than we do. We’ve historically tried to keep our build times under 15 minutes, taking percussive action when build times got over 15 minutes.

Software Engineering
Technical Deep Dives
Using GitHub Copilot to Speed Up Your Development Workflow
January 9, 2025
Grady Salzman

Grady Salzman

Using GitHub Copilot to Speed Up Your Development Workflow

As a software engineer, I’m always evaluating tools and technologies that can optimize my workflow. Developer productivity isn’t just about writing more code—it’s about reducing friction, whether that’s context-switching, making repetitive edits, or understanding unfamiliar parts of a codebase. That’s where Copilot comes in: making tasks that once felt monotonous or time-consuming into faster, more intuitive processes.

LLMs
Software Engineering
What’s That Collector Doing?
January 8, 2025
Alex Boten

Alex Boten

What’s That Collector Doing?

The Collector is one of many tools that the OpenTelemetry project provides end users to use in their observability journey. It is a powerful mechanism that can help you collect telemetry in your infrastructure and it is a key component of a telemetry pipeline. The Collector helps you better understand what your systems are doing—but who watches the Collector?

OpenTelemetry
Monitoring Windows Servers With the OpenTelemetry Collector
January 6, 2025
Martin Thwaites

Martin Thwaites

Monitoring Windows Servers With the OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector is an exceptional solution for proxying and enhancing telemetry, but it’s also great for generating telemetry from machines too. In this post, we’ll go through a basic, opinionated setup of using the OpenTelemetry Collector to extract metrics and logs from a Windows server.

OpenTelemetry