The latest News and Information on Observabilty for complex systems and related technologies.
It’s 5:00 pm on a Friday. You’re wrapping up work, ready to head into the weekend, when one of your high-value customers Slacks you that something’s not right. Requests to their service are randomly timing out and nobody can figure out what’s causing it, so they’re looking to your team for help. You sigh as you know it’s one of those all-hands-on-deck situations, so you dig out your phone and type the "going to miss dinner" text.
Elasticsearch is used for a wide variety of data types — one of these is metrics. With the introduction of Metricbeat many years ago and later our APM Agents, the metric use case has become more popular. Over the years, Elasticsearch has made many improvements on how to handle things like metrics aggregations and sparse documents. At the same time, TSVB visualizations were introduced to make visualizing metrics easier.
You know the old saying, I’m sure: “April deploys bring May joys.” Okay, maybe it doesn’t go exactly like that, but after reading what we’ve been up to for the past month, I think it might be time for an update. Let’s dive into our Feature Focus April 2023 edition.
Code instrumentation is closely tied to debugging. Ask one of the experienced developers and they will swear by it for their day-to-day debugging needs. With modest beginnings in the form of print statements that label program execution checkpoints, present-day developers employ a host of advanced techniques for code instrumentation. When carried out in the right way, it improves developer productivity and also reduces the number of intermediate build/deployment cycles for every bug fix.
Engineers know best. No machine or tool will ever match the context and capacity that engineers have to make judgment calls about what a system should or shouldn’t do. We built Honeycomb to augment human intuition, not replace it. However, translating that intuition has proven challenging. A common pitfall in many observability tools is mandating use of a query language, which seems to result in a dynamic where only a small percentage of power users in an organization know how to use it.
