Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

June 2021

Designing Honeycomb for Our Users

You might have noticed some visual changes happening in Honeycomb lately. Colors, typography, icons, and some features have started to look a bit different. While these changes are just beginning to make their way into the product, we’ve been working on them for some time. Let’s look at what has been going on behind the scenes to make them happen.

o11ycon Keynote

presented at o11ycon+hnycon, June 9-10, 2021 Nora Jones, CEO @ Jeli, Charity Majors, CTO & Co-founder@ Honeycomb o11ycon Keynote Nora Jones and Charity Majors will share their experiences leading major movements shaping the future of shipping software. Nora Jones is CEO of Jeli, and former engineer at Netflix and Slack will share her research and experience with Chaos Engineering, human factors, and site reliability. Charity Majors is Honeycomb's CTO and co-founder, who pioneered Observability as a software practice for modern teams.

OpenTelemetry, Not Just for Production Troubleshooting

OpenTelemetry, Not Just for Production Troubleshooting: How to Prevent Downtime as Early as Local Dev OpenTelemetry is a great tool for observability and debugging in production. It provides you with data that empowers understanding of what is slow or broken, as well as what you can do to fix problems that occur in production. But what if you could leverage those same OpenTelemetry capabilities in pre-production? What if you could use those capabilities during development and testing phases to proactively prevent downtime in production?

Conditional Distributed Tracing

Distributed tracing is generally a binary affair—it's off or on. Either a trace is sampled or, according to a flag, it's not. Span placement is also assumed to be an "always-on" system where spans are always added if the trace is active. For general availability and service-level objectives, this is usually good enough. But when we encounter problems, we need more. In this talk, I'll show you how to "turn up the dial" with detailed diagnostic spans and span events that are inserted using dynamic conditions.

Observability is More Fun With Friends: Stories From OpenTelemetry Collaboration

Panel Guests: Amy Tobey | Equinix Metal, Andrew Hayworth | GitHub, Liz Fong-Jones | Honeycomb, Ted Young | Lightstep The modern open source landscape is hard enough, given the (sometimes) conflicting interests of commercial partners, end-users, and project maintainers. It takes a real, intentional effort to build collaborative relationships across these groups in order to make improvements to projects. In this panel, we'll share stories about what's worked from our involvement in OpenTelemetry as maintainers, community representatives, and end-users.

Data Availability Isn't Observability

But it’s better than nothing… Most of the industry is racing to adopt better observability practices, and they’re discovering lots of power in being able to see and measure what their systems are doing. High data availability is better than none, so for the time being, what we get is often impressive. There’s a qualitative difference between observability and data availability, and this post aims to highlight it and orient how we structure our telemetry.

The State of Observability in 2021

Today, we released our second annual Observability Maturity Community Research Findings report. This year-over-year report identifies trends occurring in the observability community that we use to further develop our Observability Maturity Model. Our goal in running this annual report is to understand community perceptions and awareness of observability, how engineering teams are approaching observability, and mapping an observability maturity model that reflects current research findings.

A New Approach to Metrics

Today at o11ycon+hnycon—right now, actually, if you’re reading this blog when it was posted—we’re announcing several new Honeycomb features during the keynote. Our industry and community have come a long way since we burst onto the scene, and I’m delighted to give you another version of Honeycomb that continues to demonstrate what’s possible with observability. And it includes metrics.