Have you heard the buzz about observability with Honeycomb 🐝? It’s the best tool on the market for observing your systems in real time to reduce toil and delight users. But don’t listen to us, listen to our buzzing community of “Pollinators”–this blog post is dedicated to them 💖 An invite is sent to our shared Slack workspace “Pollinators” to everyone who signs up for Honeycomb.

At ecobee, adopting Honeycomb started as a grassroots effort. Engineers signed up for the free tier and quickly started sharing insights with teammates. When it came time for ecobee to make the “build vs. buy” decision for observability tooling, sticking with Honeycomb was the clear choice. Now on the enterprise plan, ecobee’s engineering squads rely on features like SLOs to support the business’s need to map engineering effort to user impact.

Honeycomb’s event-based pricing model is pretty simple: we only care about how many events you send. For teams running workloads at scale, the question becomes: are all of my events worth keeping? How can you reduce overall event volume while maintaining fidelity? This HoneyByte is all about sampling strategies you can use to lower costs without sacrificing the value of your data.

We’ve released some improvements to our Java Beeline library! Allow me to share all the interesting new features.

Observability changes the way you understand and interact with your applications in production. Beyond knowing what’s happening in prod, observability is also a compass that helps you discover what’s happening on the way to production. Pierre Tessier joins us on Raw & Real to talk about how Honeycomb uses observability to improve the systems that support our production applications.

This is the story of how I used Honeycomb to troubleshoot redis/redis-rb#924 and discovered a surprising workaround.