The 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard is widely read and cited within academic circles but also permeates popular culture, influencing films, literature, and art. His theories notably influenced the Wachowski siblings' The Matrix series, bringing some of his ideas into mainstream awareness.

We’re excited to bring you relational fields, a new feature that allows you to query spans based on their relationship to each other within a trace. Previously, queries considered spans in isolation: You could ask about field values on spans and aggregate them based on matching criteria, but you couldn’t use any qualifying relationships about where and how the spans appear in a trace.

You're probably familiar with the concept of real user monitoring (RUM) and how it's used to monitor websites or mobile applications. If not, here's the short version: RUM requires telemetry data, which is generated by an SDK that you import into your web or mobile application. These SDKs then hook into the JS runtime, the browser itself, or various system APIs in order to measure performance.

Relying on their traditional observability 1.0 tool, Pax8 faced hurdles in fostering a culture of ownership and curiosity due to user-based pricing limitations and an impending steep price increase. Pax8’s platform engineering team was keen on modernizing the company’s cloud commerce platform, but they were hitting obstacles with their traditional observability 1.0 tool, which relied on the three pillars of logs, metrics, and traces.

This article touches on how we at Birdie handled our transition from logs towards using OpenTelemetry as the primary mechanism for achieving world-class observability of our systems.

Today at Google Next, Charity Majors demonstrated how to use Honeycomb to find unexpected problems in our generative AI integration. Software components that integrate with AI products like Google’s Gemini are powerful in their ability to surprise us. Nondeterministic behavior means there is no such thing as “fully tested.” Never has there been more of a need for testing in production!

A few days ago, I was in a meeting with a prospect who was just starting to try out OpenTelemetry. One of the things that they did was to create an observability demo project which contained an HTTP reverse proxy, a web frontend, three microservices, a database, and a message queue. Here’s a rough diagram: Their motivation was to try out OpenTelemetry and see how much effort it took for them to instrument their system.

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are Google's preferred metrics for measuring the quality of the user experience for browser web apps. Currently, Core Web Vitals measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. These are the main indicators of what a user’s experience will be while using a web page: Note: As of March 12th, INP has become a stable Core Web Vital, replacing First Input Delay (FID).