The current landscape of what our customers are dealing with in monitoring and observability can be a bit of a mess. For one thing, there are varying expectations and implementations when it comes to observability data. For another, most customers have to lean on a hodgepodge of tools that might blend open source and proprietary, require extensive onboarding as team members have to learn which tools are used for what, and have a steep learning curve in general.

Recently, we added a new derived column function to Honeycomb, INGEST_TIMESTAMP(), which can help customers debug event latency and/or inaccurate timestamps. A meaningful minority of the events sent to Honeycomb are already old when they arrive, and a very special few claim to have been sent from the future. Has this happened to you? Let’s do an experiment.

Last week, we announced that Refinery, our platform-agnostic sampling solution, is generally available. But it’s always better to see it for yourself. Follow the steps in this HoneyByte to see how Refinery works by running it locally.

Today, we announced that Refinery is now generally available. With Refinery, it’s now easy to highlight the critical debugging data you need and to stop paying for the rest. Refinery is a sampling solution that lets you control resource costs at scale without sacrificing data fidelity. Support for Refinery is now also included in Honeycomb Enterprise plans.