Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At Honeycomb, we love involving our customers when we can. We asked: “What was the first thing you found value from with Honeycomb?” Here are some of our favorite answers.

OpenTelemetry is one of the most fascinating and ambitious open source projects of this era. It’s currently the second most active project in the CNCF (the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), with only Kubernetes being more active. I was at KubeCon Europe last month, delivering a talk on OpenTelemetry and it was amazing to see the full house and the excitement and interest around the project.

With the growing pace of tech-oriented companies, software development is picking up. Many new tech stacks are coming into the world to make the development process easier, and a lot of these new companies are using PHP as the backend framework for their apps. PHP, with its various version updates, has grown popular among developers. Most PHP developers have heard and worked with Laravel at least once.

I have been an AWS customer since 2010 and in the early days I, along with just about everyone else on AWS, spent a lot of my time just managing infrastructure. Patching AMIs, configuring load balancers, updating auto-scaling configurations, and so on. It was the sort of thankless task that no one cared about until something went wrong! The very definition of what Werner Vogel often refers to as “undifferentiated heavy-lifting”.

In many critical areas, you can automate the completion of repetitive chores in an efficient and effective manner by using a computer language such as Python. When you are just starting out, it’s vital to understand the fundamentals of Python via coding examples. However, if you want to improve your Python skills, you should concentrate on constructing things and automating real-world tasks.

A few months ago, I wrote about using the Sqlyze data source plugin in Grafana to query COVID-19 wastewater surveillance data on Databricks. Did you know that with the Sqlyze Enterprise plugin, you can also access REST APIs (web services), treat them as database tables, and query them using SQL? You can use any ODBC driver you like, and it’s not limited to relational databases, either. You can query NoSQL and document databases, too.

Downdetector is a platform that displays the current status of internet services, websites, mobile apps, and providers. The information is crowdsourced from users who report issues as they come across them. Downdetector is a popular service. Nowadays, organizations depend on a huge variety of services and so need to have the most reliable and detailed view of everything that’s going on.

Kentik Synthetics is all about proactively testing and monitoring specific elements of your network, the services it relies on, and the applications it delivers. That means using artificial traffic instead of end-user traffic to test a variety of aspects of digital experience monitoring like device availability, DNS activity, web application page load times, and BGP activity. But to test an end-user’s experience interacting with a website, we need to approach things differently.