Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Two years ago, Sentry built a metrics product that worked great on paper. But when we dogfooded it, we realized it was not what our customers really needed. Two weeks before launch, we killed the whole thing. Here’s what we learned, why classical time-series metrics break down for debugging modern applications, and how we rebuilt the system from scratch.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 wrapped up in Atlanta last week, and it sure did feel like a big one for OpenTelemetry. Between Observability Day, the project updates, and the activity around the OpenTelemetry Observatory booth, you could feel how quickly the ecosystem is maturing.

More and more enterprises are shifting toward private cloud and hybrid deployments for control, data residency, and security. At the same time, observability is no longer a “nice to have” tool. It's mission-critical for teams driving rapid change across cloud-native, multi-service architectures. Leaders are realizing they need deep visibility and rapid debugging everywhere their systems run.

In July, we introduced powerful new Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline features that helped teams take control of their observability data with safe sampling, flexible rehydration, and a visual pipeline builder. Since then, we’ve built on that foundation. Today, we’re introducing the latest enhancements to Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline, which give teams deeper visibility into pipeline health, more efficient access to archived telemetry data, and reduced operational complexity.

Okay, I'm going to say something that would make 2016 Charity want to throw her laptop across the room: we're making a major investment in metrics at Honeycomb. I know, I know. "But Charity, you literally called them ‘shit salad!’" I did. Also "nerfed dimensions." I said they would "fucking kneecap you." For most of the past decade, I've been social media’s most reliable anti-metrics evangelist. Have I repented? No.

When we introduced Canvas in beta, our goal was to reimagine how teams explore and collaborate around their observability data without requiring manual querying. Canvas has quickly become the AI-guided workspace that helps teams transform raw telemetry into meaningful, shared understanding faster than ever before. And today, we’re thrilled to announce that Canvas is now Generally Available (GA) for all Honeycomb users.

Recently I've been to Lisbon's Web Summit conference, a 3 day, 70,000 participants, 15 stages, 800+ speakers event. Even though there was a track called "AI Summit", all the talks were about AI and AI Agents and how the future of the web, business, economy is more and more AI, and how businesses and people should take steps to adapt as soon as possible to an online world managed and operated by Artificial Intelligence.

As major incidents like AWS’s October 2025 outage illustrate, modern systems are immensely interconnected. A failure in one can lead to a cascade of downstream problems. In this case, issues with DNS resolution for DynamoDB led to widespread disruptions with other AWS services and, subsequently, thousands of applications and services that rely on that infrastructure.