Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Observability is the ability to see and understand the internal state of a system from its external outputs. Logs, Metrics, and Traces, collectively called observability data, are three external outputs widely considered to be three pillars of observability. Now more than ever, organizations of all sizes must employ the necessary processes and technologies to harness the power of their data and make it more actionable.

Just a few short months ago, we talked about a bunch of updates to Honeycomb’s support for OpenTelemetry. To the surprise of no one, we’ve got more updates to share!

StackState’s new 4T Monitors introduce the ability to monitor IT topology as it changes over time. Now your observability processes can trigger alerts on changes in topology that don’t match an ideal state, on deviations in metrics and events and on complex combinations of parameters. Monitoring topology as part of your observability efforts enriches the concept of environment health by adding the dimension of topology.

You know that old adage about not seeing the forest for the trees? In our Authors’ Cut series, we’ve been looking at the trees that make up the observability forest—among them, CI/CD pipelines, Service Level Objectives, and the Core Analysis Loop. Today, I'd like to step back and take a look at how observability fits into the broader technical and cultural shifts in technology: cloud-native, DevOps, and SRE.

I am thrilled to share with you that Honeycomb now has a Field CTO: our very own Liz Fong-Jones. When Liz joined us, nearly four years ago, she was our first developer advocate and principal engineer. It was a bit of a risky move—on both our parts.

With an exploding volume of data and systems comes the need for observability, or the ability to understand the internal states of a system from knowledge of its external outputs. As a result, observability data's importance is at an all-time high. Businesses spanning every industry use it in various ways to respond to issues, increase agility, mitigate risk, and ultimately provide better experiences for their users. It’s an incredibly valuable commodity.

At Honeycomb, the datastore and query systems that we manage are sociotechnical in nature, meaning the move to observability requires a sociological shift as much as it does a technical one. We've covered the technical part in several prior discussions for our Authors’ Cut series, but the social aspect is a little squishier. Namely: How do you solve the people and culture problems that are necessary in making the shift to adopt observability practices?

To many engineers, the idea that you can accurately and comprehensively track your application's user experience using just a few simple metrics might sound far-fetched. Believe it or not, there are four metrics that aim to do just that. They're called the four Golden Signals and should be a core part of your observability and reliability practices.

Traditionally, when monitoring or troubleshooting active incidents, engineers access logs directly on the source system. However, modern IT environments are now too complex, and engineers can no longer manage and analyze logs effectively this way. With the adoption of microservices and the use of cloud-native infrastructure, it’s no longer feasible.

Today, I’d like to tell you about a new community-contributed integration that connects Honeycomb to your ServiceNow workflows. My new integration reimagines what’s possible when connecting observability tools with ITSM systems. This post explains how it works and how to get started with it.