When do you delete instrumentation? You delete instrumentation when you delete code. Other than that, if you’re doing things right: almost never. One of the best things about honeycomb is that it completely transforms the incentives around preserving instrumentation. With metrics-based tools, the most valuable metrics are always custom metrics. You need to define a custom metric for literally any question you might ever want to ask about the app and its utilization or performance.

Any significant shift in an organization’s software engineering culture has the potential to feel tectonic, and observability (o11y for short)—or more specifically, Observability Driven Development—is no different. Leaning into observability, which calls for tool-enhanced investigation, hypothesis testing, and data richness can be cumbersome even for the most veteran of teams.

Miss O11y is delighted to welcome our newest band member: Martin Thwaites! Martin has been a member of the Honeycomb user community practically since its inception. He is a UK-based consultant who specializes in helping teams scale up and tackle challenging business problems, and a long-time contributor to the Azure and.NET communities. We think he looks ✨amazing✨ in a tiara.

It’s time we had a real conversation about why UX designers everywhere are still unhappy, why that elusive “seat at the table” feels so impossibly out of reach to so many (even at companies that embrace design), and how this impacts your business Design is facing down an epidemic of designers who feel burned out, taken for granted, marginalized, and disrespected. Yes, there is something different about our experience compared to other disciplines.

Ah, good question! TL;DR: Trace instead of log. Traces show connection, performance, concurrency, and causality. Logs are the original observability, right? Back in the day, I did all my debugging with `printf.` Sometimes I still write `console.log(“JESS WAS HERE”)` to see that my code ran. That’s instrumentation, technically. What if I emitted a “JESS WAS HERE” span instead? What’s so great about a span in a trace? Yeah, and so do logs in any decent framework.

I always tell people "Observability is not logs, metrics, and traces! Observability is empowering your team to ask questions." That's very aspirational and sounds good, but it's not at all clear. I now have a self-contained story that perfectly explains it!

Being on call is challenging. It’s signing up to be operating complex services in a totally interruptible manner, at all hours of the day or night, with limited context. It’s therefore critical to have proper on-call on-boarding procedures, offer continuous training sessions, and continuously improve documentation. We also need to make sure people feel safe by providing ways to reduce their stress, and make room for questions to surface all sorts of uncertainties around our operations.

Big news: I can finally stop pointing anyone who asks about Honeycomb’s story for frontend observability to Emily’s blog post from 2017 on “Instrumenting Page Loads with Honeycomb.” (It was a great post, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think any of us knew it would bear such weight for so long.) I am ecstatic to announce that we have released a new whitepaper called “Getting Started With Honeycomb Client-Side Instrumentation for Browser Applications,” wri

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is a yearly event that brings together leading brands in the gaming industry to talk about trends in development and showcase new features and releases. One of the cool things about the conference is that it’s an excellent opportunity for gaming enthusiasts, aspiring game developers, and industry vendors to connect, network, learn and celebrate the achievements of the industry.

Dear Acronymically, I'll try to answer without using a single (new) acronym! First things first—"PRO" refers to our Pro plan, rather than being an acronym in and of itself. Honeycomb Pro is our cost-effective offering for professionals like you who are running a few production workloads! And we're hoping that folks will get even more benefit now that they have access to our SLO feature!

Honeycomb Pro is about to get even better. Starting today, all Pro accounts have access to Honeycomb Metrics and two Service Level Objectives (SLOs), previously only available to Enterprise accounts. Full disclosure: Later this month, the price of Pro plans will be increasing as well (see below). However, existing Pro customers (including those that sign up before the new pricing goes into effect) will be able to enjoy the new capabilities at existing prices for a full year, until April 2023!