Honeycomb is a tool for introspecting and interrogating your production systems. We can gather data from any source—from your clients (mobile, IoT, browsers), vendored software, or your own code. Single-node debugging tools miss crucial details in a world where infrastructure is dynamic and ephemeral. Honeycomb is a new type of tool, designed and evolved to meet the real needs of platforms, microservices, serverless apps, and complex systems.
Honeycomb provides full stack observability—designed for high cardinality data and collaborative problem solving, enabling engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together. Founded on the experience of debugging problems at the scale of millions of apps serving tens of millions of users, we empower every engineer to instrument and query the behavior of their system.
This week we’re shipping a few changes to our Query Builder interface. While they may appear small, they are the first steps in a larger plan that will help you more easily share your own observations about queries with your teammates, all around Honeycomb.
It wasn’t until the conference was ending that we learned that everybody thought we were kinda nuts.
Nobody knows your services/infra better than you, not even Honeycomb. If there’s one maxim for Honeycomb, it’s that context is king. Context determines the questions you can ask. The only way to make complex systems truly tractable is to make all questions possible. Ergo: more context. Context everywhere.
When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t realize just how many different ways folks could use them.
Now Java developers can leverage Honeycomb to gain insight into the behavior of their apps and services by using an SDK similar to the ones we’ve already released for Go, Python, Javascript and Ruby.
This document discusses the history, concept, goals, and approaches to achieving observability in today’s software industry, with an eye to the future benefits and potential evolution of the software development practice as a whole.
Journey from Common Logs to Structured Events! by Ben Hartshorne
Engineering Large Systems When You're Not Google Or Facebook by Charity Majors
Sam Stokes speaks at the O'Reilly Software Architecture conference in New York about how to build observable systems.
Event driven configuration with AWS Lambda by Ryan Armstrong, Dropbox
Serverless Gone Bad by Eamonn O'Brien-Strain, Google
