Understanding Metrics, Logs, Events and Traces - the key pillars of observability and their pros and cons for SRE and DevOps teams.

As more organizations leverage the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform and services to drive operational efficiency and bring products to market, managing logs becomes a critical component of maintaining visibility and safeguarding multi-account AWS environments. Traditionally, logs are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and then shipped to an external monitoring and analysis solution for further processing.

Datadog and Splunk are among the most popular performance monitoring tools available on the market. If you’re looking for such a solution and looking to scratch one off your shortlist, look no further than this article. In this Datadog vs Splunk comparison, we will take a deep dive into everything each tool has to offer. We will point out their similarities and differences to help you decide which tool can meet your needs better.

Honeycomb recently released our Query Assistant, which uses ChatGPT behind the scenes to build queries based on your natural language question. It's pretty cool. While developing this feature, our team (including Tanya Romankova and Craig Atkinson) built tracing in from the start, and used it to get the feature working smoothly. Here's an example. This trace shows a Query Assistant call that took 14 seconds. Is ChatGPT that slow? Our traces can tell us!

“Observability” seems to be the buzzword du jour in IT these days but what does it actually mean, and how is it any different from plain, old monitoring? In simple terms, observability is the ability to understand how a system is performing and how it is behaving from the data that system generates. It is not just about monitoring metrics or collecting logs, but also understanding the context of those metrics and logs, and how they relate to the overall health of the system.

As the largest liquidity network in crypto, Paradigm facilitates more than $11 billion in monthly volumes, representing nearly 40% global cryptocurrency option flows. Their free-to-use platform provides a single point of access to multi-asset, multi-instrument liquidity on demand, and Software Architect Jameel Al-Aziz leads the team of developers who build and maintain the platform.

Progressive delivery is a modification of continuous delivery that allows developers to release new features to users in a gradual, controlled fashion. It does this in two ways. Firstly, by using feature flags to turn specific features ‘on’ or ‘off’ in production, based on certain conditions, such as specific subsets of users. This lets developers deploy rapidly to production and perform testing there before turning a feature on.