This episode in our Honeycomb Learn series looks at how to cut stress levels when debugging issues in production. Starting with a hypothesis, run fast queries, and then navigate to the code where the problem lies. Be proactive and set triggers to let you know if something needs attention. When engineering is about to ship a new release, set a feature flag to watch how production behaves in real-time. Curtail performance issues and reduce customer impact with the right tools to better understand production systems, right now.

Distributed systems bring complexity for developer and ops teams. When incidents occur in production, expected and unexpected, you want to pinpoint which part of the service is giving problems. Distributed tracing illuminates distributed systems, making your logs easier to navigate. Quickly identify where there are errors or latency in your code or service, even within 3rd party services you use. Instrumentation is the key to the best tracing experience possible.

The power of Honeycomb lies in the way you analyze production data using different interactive views. See what's happening across many dimensions (fields) in your system with BubbleUp. Pick the timeframe, breakdown by any field, such as customer name or ID, then filter by a specific dataset or where any errors occur. The query results are heatmap that highlight events over the baseline, over time. Use BubbleUp to select outliers on the heatmap and drill down to all related fields in that data. It will help you understand which part of the code is misbehaving.