It’s harder to understand and operate production systems in 2021 than it was in 2001. Why is that? Shouldn’t we have gotten better at this in the past two decades? There are valid reasons why it’s harder: The architecture of our systems has gotten a lot more sophisticated and complex over the past 20 years. We’re not running monoliths on a few beefy servers these days.

In this blog post we’ll help answer the age old question, “What does this service talk to and what does it say?” We’ll see how to inspect inbound and outbound REST API calls to see what calls are being made and what incoming traffic causes a reaction. This can be pretty handy when you’re taking over maintenance of an existing service, or if your code just isn’t behaving the way you expect.

Ooh, good question! My favorite thing about this part of the year is that work slows down, everybody is on vacation, and those of us not traveling get to work on little projects that we’re too busy to touch most of the year. As Martin Thwaites put it: “The Product Owners are away, the devs will play.” For Martin, this year, “play” means adding tracing to more of their services.

On Dec. 8, we gathered the Grafana EMEA community for another dynamic meetup. Experts from the Grafana Labs and k6 teams alongside observability pros from different organizations covered topics ranging from shift left observability practices to monitoring your green thumb at home with Grafana. In case you missed the virtual get together, here’s a recap of each talk along with the session videos.

IDC's new white paper delves into full-stack observability — what it is, why it’s different from traditional monitoring and the value that it can provide.

At Honeycomb Developer Week, I got an opportunity to walk through a couple of fun new features we’ve shipped since August and ways that we’ve been able to improve Honeycomb for you. Hearing feedback from our users and customers— through support requests, in the Pollinators community, from Twitter, etc.—helps us make Honeycomb better for you.