As systems get ever more complicated with more layers in the application stack, it can become more difficult to keep track of what is happening at all of the different, discrete levels and this is where distributed tracing comes into play.

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 the incentives around preserving instrumentation. With metrics-based tools, the most valuable metrics are always custom metrics. You need to define a custom metric for literally any question you might ever want to ask about the app and its utilization or performance.

Getting a good grasp on your application, especially when it is distributed across multiple clouds, kubernetes clusters and serverless functions is not an easy fit.

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 investigation, hypothesis testing, and data richness can be cumbersome even for the most veteran of teams.

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 helping teams scale up and tackle challenging business problems, and a long-time contributor to the Azure and.NET communities. We think he looks ✨amazing✨ in a tiara.

DevOps: Development and Operations joined together in perfect harmony, one feeding the other and vice-versa. That's the dream. But it's easy for the link between the two to be broken. 'Dev' stops talking to 'Ops,' or Ops falls out with Dev, often because of a lack of understanding of each other's goals. That's where Monitoring and Observability come in. They're like the mediators whose job is to make sure the two main players in DevOps keep that metaphorical dialogue open.

OpenTelemetry has been getting a lot of attention in the observability field. Moreover, in StackState’s latest release, we added support for OpenTelemetry traces. Melcom van Eeden, software developer at StackState, was one of our developer champions who made this possible. In addition to joining us on this episode of StackPod, he wrote a blog post on how to leverage OpenTelemetry with StackState and he recorded a tutorial video about the topic.

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 that embrace design), and how this impacts your business Design is facing down an epidemic of designers who feel burned out, taken for granted, marginalized, and disrespected. Yes, there is something different about our experience compared to other disciplines.

Two recent studies conducted by Nucleus Research, focused on how a global telecommunications provider, and multi-line insurance company realized quantified business value through Elastic. The companies that were studied saw great levels of satisfaction from deploying Elastic Cloud. Through their adoption they were able to increase the maturity of their tech stack and circumvent prior limitations in scalability.

Keeping your systems secure is a never-ending challenge. Not only is it necessary to monitor and secure your own tech stack, but each new service a company uses creates another potential avenue for bad actors to try to exploit for their own ends.

Forget the latest tech gadgets and the newest products. One of the most talked about trends in observability right now? “SLOs have really become a buzzword, and everyone wants them,” said Grafana Labs principal software engineer Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein on a recent episode of “Grafana’s Big Tent,” our new podcast about people, community, tech, and tools around observability.

Spring makes building a reliable application much easier thanks to its declarative transaction management. It also supports programmatic transaction management, but that’s not as common. In this article, I want to focus on the declarative transaction management angle, since it seems much harder to debug compared to the programmatic approach. This is partially true. We can’t put a breakpoint on a transactional annotation. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Ah, good question! TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show connection, performance, concurrency, and causality. Logs are the original observability, right? Back in the day, I did all my debugging with `printf.` Sometimes I still write `console.log(“JESS WAS HERE”)` to see that my code ran. That’s instrumentation, technically. What if I emitted a “JESS WAS HERE” span instead? What’s so great about a span in a trace? Yeah, and so do logs in any decent framework.

You’ve likely heard the term Observability lately. There’s a fundamental change taking place in the Monitoring space, and Observability is behind it. Observability itself is a broad topic, so in this post we’ll talk about what it means to move from Application Performance Monitoring to Application Performance Observability.

I always tell people "Observability is not logs, metrics, and traces! Observability is empowering your team to ask questions." That's very aspirational and sounds good, but it's not at all clear. I now have a self-contained story that perfectly explains it!

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 proper on-call on-boarding procedures, offer continuous training sessions, and continuously improve documentation. We also need to make sure people feel safe by providing ways to reduce their stress, and make room for questions to surface all sorts of uncertainties around our operations.

Big news: I can finally stop pointing anyone who asks about Honeycomb’s story for frontend observability to Emily’s blog post from 2017 on “Instrumenting Page Loads with Honeycomb.” (It was a great post, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think any of us knew it would bear such weight for so long.) I am ecstatic to announce that we have released a new whitepaper called “Getting Started With Honeycomb Client-Side Instrumentation for Browser Applications,” wri

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 things about the conference is that it’s an excellent opportunity for gaming enthusiasts, aspiring game developers, and industry vendors to connect, network, learn and celebrate the achievements of the industry.

The WP Engine platform provides brands the solutions they need to create remarkable sites and apps on WordPress that drive their business forward faster. It hosts over 1.5 million websites, serving over 175,000 customers in more than 150 different countries, and processes 5.2 billion requests per day. In total, WP Engine’s footprint comprises about 8 percent of the entire web.

Dear Acronymically, I'll try to answer without using a single (new) acronym! First things first—"PRO" refers to our Pro plan, rather than being an acronym in and of itself. Honeycomb Pro is our cost-effective offering for professionals like you who are running a few production workloads! And we're hoping that folks will get even more benefit now that they have access to our SLO feature!

It’s common sense. When a logstorm hits, you don’t want to be left scrambling to find the one engineer from each team in your organization that actually understands the logging system – then spending even more time mapping the logging format of each team with the formats of every other team, all before you can begin to respond to the incident at hand. It’s a model that simply won’t scale.

Honeycomb Pro is about to get even better. Starting today, all Pro accounts have access to Honeycomb Metrics and two Service Level Objectives (SLOs), previously only available to Enterprise accounts. Full disclosure: Later this month, the price of Pro plans will be increasing as well (see below). However, existing Pro customers (including those that sign up before the new pricing goes into effect) will be able to enjoy the new capabilities at existing prices for a full year, until April 2023!

I don’t care about religious wars over “which logger is the best”. They all have their issues. Having said that, the worst logger is probably the one built “in-house”… So yes, they suck, but re-inventing the wheel is probably far worse. Let’s discuss making these loggers suck less with proper usage guidelines that range from the obvious to subtle. Hopefully, you can use this post as the basis of your company’s standard for logging best practices.

When IT operators and architects begin their journey with Google Cloud, Day 0 observability needs tend to focus on infrastructure and aim to address questions about resource needs, a plan for scaling, and similar considerations. During this phase, developers and DevOps engineers also make a plan for how to get deep observability into the performance of third-party and open-source applications running on their Compute Engine VMs.

The one certainty you will find in IT, developer, and SRE roles is that things always change! One hot topic in DevOps communities is observability. A long word, you may be wondering what it really means and how you can add it to your skillset. Here’s a quick primer to get you going on your path to observability.

Managing the complexities of today’s cloud native infrastructure has resulted in the increased need for observability. As cloud adoption continues to grow, the need to deliver a better customer experience, scale efficiently and increase momentum on innovation has never been more important. For many organizations to carry out these principles, two technologies are helping organizations deliver on these goals faster: Monitoring-as-Code and Infrastructure-as-Code.