We often say that Honeycomb helps you find a needle in your haystack. But how exactly is that done? This post walks you through when and how to visualize your data with heatmaps, creating a log scale to surface data you might otherwise miss, and using BubbleUp to quickly discover the patterns behind why certain data points are different.

Nic Wise at Tend Health recently wrote a series of blog posts exploring how they moved away from logs and metrics, toward adopting observability with Honeycomb. In that series, he shares lessons learned as they got their NodeJS app instrumented in an AWS environment making use of CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda, and a few other services. Tend is a New Zealand-based healthcare platform launching in 2020.

Outreach is the number one sales engagement platform with the largest customer base and industry-leading usage. Outreach helps companies dramatically increase productivity and drive smarter, more insightful engagement with their customers. Outreach is a privately held company based in Seattle, Washington. Tech Environment & Tools: Millions of Logs and Limited View Metrics.

When I first started following Charity on Twitter back in early 2019, I was quickly overwhelmed by the new words and concepts she was discussing. I liked the results she described: faster debugging, less alert fatigue, happier users. Those are all things I wanted for my team! But I was hung up on these big polysyllabic words, which stopped me from taking those first steps toward improving our own observability.

Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO) and its clinical interface terminology form the foundation healthcare enterprises need, including effective management of Electronic Health Record (EMR) problem lists and accurate documentation. Over 4,500 hospitals and 500,000 physicians use IMO products on a daily basis. With Honeycomb, the engineering team at IMO was able to find hidden architectural issues that were previously obscured in their logs.

Honeycomb is an event-based observability tool. Rather than relying on the rigid pre-aggregated measures provided by metrics, Honeycomb instead favors using events because they provide a much greater degree of flexibility. But that doesn’t mean metrics don’t belong in Honeycomb. Our new whitepaper, Getting Started With Honeycomb Metrics, breaks down exactly how to do that.

As a Customer Advocate, I talk to a lot of prospective Honeycomb users who want to understand how observability fits into their existing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice. While I have enough of a familiarity with the discipline to get myself into trouble, I wanted to learn more about what SREs do in their day-to-day work so that I’d be better able to help them determine if Honeycomb is a good fit for their needs.

At Honeycomb, we talk a lot about eating our own dogfood. Since we use Honeycomb to observe Honeycomb, we have many opportunities to try out UX changes ourselves before rolling them out to all of our users. UX doesn’t stop at the UI though! Developer experience matters too, especially when getting started with observability. We often get questions about the difference between using our Beeline SDKs compared with other integrations, especially OpenTelemetry (abbreviated “OTel”).

Thanks to awesome contributions from the community and the hard work of our integrations team, the Honeycomb Rails integration comes with lots of great features out of the box. This post is an end-to-end tutorial to show you exactly the steps involved, from creating a new Honeycomb team to getting your data in and observing your app in production.

Curious how to get data flowing from your Go application into Honeycomb using OpenTelemetry? This guide will help you step by step through adding OpenTelemetry into your web service and sending the data to Honeycomb.