Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At LDX3 in London last week, two roundtables I hosted with engineering leaders confirmed what many of us are starting to feel: observability isn’t just important—it’s becoming essential to how modern teams navigate the pressure to move fast and stay resilient.

One of the great things about OpenTelemetry is that it’s a standard, and standards tend to proliferate. I was excited to see Claude Code add OpenTelemetry metric and log support in a recent release. What was really interesting—beyond the ability to capture usage data from Claude Code—is that you can also get pretty detailed logs about what you’re doing with Claude Code.

Every day, enterprise companies generate terabytes of observability data while engineering teams are under pressure to cut costs. One of the easiest ways to reduce observability bills is through sampling: intentionally sending only a representative portion of telemetry data, rather than the full volume, to your observability tool. But turning down the dial is risky.

On May 15th, 2025, Honeycomb hosted Observability Day (or O11yDay) in the London financial district. The skies were clear and the weather was wonderful and we had a huge turnout, from our networking breakfast to the happy hour at the end of the day.

AI discourse these days is all over the place. Depending on who you talk to, AI’s are absolute flash-in-the-pan junk, or they’re the best thing since sliced bread. I want to cut through the noise, though, and see for myself what someone can do out here on the bleeding edge. Thus, I’m setting myself a challenge: write a usable—and useful—application with Claude Code, from soup to nuts. Here are the rules: With our ground rules established, let’s figure out our app!

In a really broad sense, the history of observability tools over the past couple of decades have been about a pretty simple concept: how do we make terabytes of heterogeneous telemetry data comprehensible to human beings? New Relic did this for the Rails revolution, Datadog did it for the rise of AWS, and Honeycomb led the way for OpenTelemetry.

We recently had the privilege of hosting several industry experts and technology executives across platform strategy, SRE, and engineering enablement for breakfast at our Observability Day in London. We noted that they’re all facing the same fundamental tension: deliver faster, scale smarter, stay resilient, and somehow get ahead of what’s coming next. But how do you move fast without breaking things? And how do you prove the value of the things you don’t break?

I have a personal vendetta against “dashboards.” Not because they’re not useful—I actually think they’re extremely useful—but rather because they’re generally built with the wrong user in mind, then used by a completely different user, and for a different use case.

You shipped your latest release. You tested it on emulators, QA devices, and the latest OS versions. But now it’s live and running on thousands or millions of mobile devices, across a jungle of screen sizes, hardware specs, OS versions, and network conditions. A user reports a crash on an old Samsung device over 3G. Someone else complains the app feels “sluggish” after updating. You dig through logs. Rebuild test cases. Ping the backend team. Try to reproduce. Yet, still no answers.

Mobile apps are a little different from services run on servers. You build your mobile app, you ship it off to the world, and then it gets run by the end user on their own machine. If your app is running poorly on some percentage of users’ devices, you may never know. That’s where observability comes in. There are certain important metrics that every mobile app has in common.