Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If there’s one thing folks working in internet services love saying, it’s: "Yeah, sure, but that won’t scale." It’s an easy complaint to make, but in this post, we’ll walk through building a service using an approach that doesn’t scale in order to learn more about the problem. (And in the process, discovering that it actually did scale much longer than one would expect.)

Rich Anakor, chief solutions architect at Vanguard, is on a small team with a big goal: Give Vanguard customers a better experience by enabling internal engineering teams to better understand their massively complex production environment—and to do that quickly across the entire organization, in the notoriously slow-moving financial services industry. They also had a big problem: The production environment itself.

Current observability practice is largely based on manual instrumentation, which requires adding code in relevant points in the user’s business logic code to generate telemetry data. This can become quite burdensome and create a barrier to entry for many wishing to implement observability in their environment. This is especially true in Kubernetes environments and microservices architecture.

This is the second post in our series about Lattice, Honeycomb’s new design system and how we’re applying a user-centric design philosophy to our product. Lattice begin! At Honeycomb, we understand that our users are often under a great deal of pressure when troubleshooting complicated issues in their applications.