Every new layer of infrastructure piles onto an already fragile web of interconnected challenges, making it painfully clear: traditional monitoring can’t keep up. You’re drowning in alerts, buried in data, and yet somehow still flying blind when real issues arise. More notifications don’t mean more insight, and more data doesn’t guarantee better decisions.

Are you attempting to connect Honeycomb to a standalone (not hosted with Vercel) Next.js application? Most of the Next.js OpenTelemetry samples in the wild show how to connect Next.js to Vercel’s observability solution when hosting on their platform. But what if you’re hosting your own standalone Next.js server on Node.js? This blog post will get you started ingesting your Next.js application’s telemetry into Honeycomb.

In today’s fast-paced software landscape, downtime is costly, debugging is time-consuming, and developers are constantly under pressure to resolve issues quickly. Observability tools have traditionally been built for operations and SRE teams, focusing on post-mortem analysis rather than proactive debugging. When developers gain real-time insights into live applications and fix issues without disrupting the software lifecycle it has been proven to be a game changer for a myriad of reasons.

Here at Honeycomb, we emphasize that organizations are sociotechnical systems. At a high level, that means that “wet-brained” people and the stuff they do is irreducible to “dry-brained” computations. That cashes out as the inability to ultimately remove or replace people in organizations with computers, in spite of what artificial general intelligence (AGI) ideologues would have you believe.

Modern IT estates are increasingly complex, generating vast amounts of data – some critical and actionable, but much of it mere noise. Extracting meaningful insights to ensure optimal system health and IT performance is beyond the scope of humans. This is where observability, enhanced by AI and automation, becomes essential.

For teams in many organizations, the work of IT and network management keeps getting more difficult. A recent EMA survey offers some findings that clearly illustrate this point. When respondents were asked which networking skills are the most difficult to find, several roles received a response of 30% or more, including network security, network monitoring and troubleshooting, and data center networking.

Datadog and New Relic didn’t become some of the best observability platforms today by accident. Unlike traditional monitoring tools, both are built from the ground up to be cloud-native. This design is crucial for tracking system health across hybrid cloud infrastructure, modern applications, and microservices/containerized architectures. Both platforms also offer more flexible pricing models than the traditional subscription-based pricing you’ll see elsewhere.

With more and more people adopting OpenTelemetry and specifically using the tracing signal, I’ve seen an uptick in people wanting to add the entire request and response body as an attribute. This isn’t ideal, as it wasn’t when people were logging the body as text logs. In this blog post, I’ll explain why this is a bad idea, what are the pitfalls, and more importantly, what you should do instead.

“Impossibly expensive.”“Generic database metrics.”“Exceeding limits.”“No transparency.” These are the words our customers use to explain why they looked for a Datadog alternative and migrated onto Grafana Labs’ observability solutions. Grafana Cloud provided the scalability that LexisNexis Risk Solutions needed to migrate acquired companies into a unified observability platform. “We’ve had migrations from Datadog.

Have you ever wondered how to navigate the complexities of managing Kubernetes clusters effectively? Observability is the key, and Elasticsearch plays a pivotal role in storing and analyzing the critical data that keeps your systems running smoothly.