Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When we introduced Secondary Storage two years ago, it was a deliberate compromise between economy and performance. Compared to Honeycomb’s primary NVMe storage attached to dedicated servers, secondary storage let customers keep more data for less money. They could query over longer time ranges, but with a substantial performance penalty; queries which used secondary storage took many times longer to run than those which didn’t.

It’s that season, when we take time to consider what we’re grateful for and extend thanks to those we value and the experiences we treasure. One special aspect of America’s Thanksgiving holiday is the inclusiveness of celebrating across all communities and simply sharing, taking time to enjoy the fruits of the land. Giving thanks in late November can bring some fulfillment, but it should also be a reminder that we need to practice gratitude more regularly.

As a human who entered this space via marketing, I often turn to my teammates for context. I recently asked the hive, why do we like Monitorama so much?

There’s been a fair bit of buzz lately about OpenTelemetry, which is the next major version of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. The leadership of those two projects have come together to create OpenTelemetry, which combines the best parts of OpenTracing and OpenCensus to create one open source project to help with your instrumentation needs.

We had an excellent time at PagerDuty Summit 2019. The folks we met at the booth and in the hallway track felt particularly kindred to Team Honeybee: we’ve all been on-call, and we all want it to be better. The main themes of the conference revolved around best practices and learnings for finding issues faster, knowing exactly what to do in an incident, enabling on-call to know how to prioritize an alert, and what our community can do to improve on-call life.

At Honeycomb, we’re big fans of AWS Spot Instances. During a recent bill reduction exercise, we found significant savings in running our API service on Spot, and now look to use it wherever we can. Not all services fit the mold for Spot, though.

It’s an exciting time here at Honeycomb HQ—today, we’re thrilled to announce our recent fundraise led by Scale Venture Partners, and to welcome Ariel Tseitlin to our board.

In theory, Honeycomb is always up. Our servers run without hiccups, our user interface loads rapidly and is highly responsive, and our query engine is lightning fast. In practice, this isn’t always perfectly the case — and dedicated readers of this blog have learned about how we use those experiences to improve the product.

I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: observability is not a synonym for monitoring, and there are no three pillars. The pillars are bullshit.

We recently sponsored our partner CloudBees’ conference DevOps World & JenkinsWorld in San Francisco and our message “Observe how Customers Experience Your Build” resonated well with the folks we met. Release engineers are critical to the continuous delivery cycle and knowing the right time to ship is important for internal business stakeholders but more importantly end-user customers and especially if it’s a significant release.