Honeycomb

San Francisco, CA, USA
2016
Mar 20, 2023   |  By Rynn Mancuso
The open source community talks a lot about the problem of aligning incentives. If you’re not familiar with the discourse, most of this conversation so far has centered around the most classic model of open source: the solo unpaid developer who maintains a tiny but essential library that’s holding up half the internet. For example, Denis Pushkarev, the solo maintainer of popular JavaScript library core-js, announced that he can’t continue if not better compensated.
Mar 16, 2023   |  By Fred Hebert
Last year, I wrote How We Define SRE Work. This article described how I came up with the charter for the SRE team, which we bootstrapped right around then. It’s been a while. The SRE team is now four engineers and a manager. We are involved in all sorts of things across the organization, across all sorts of spheres. We are embedded in teams and we handle training, vendor management, capacity planning, cluster updates, tooling, and so on.
Mar 14, 2023   |  By Nick Rycar
It’s been a minute since our last Feature Focus, and we have a bit of catching up to do! I’m happy to report we’ll resume monthly updates next month, but until then, please enjoy this super-sized winter digest of what we’ve been up to at Honeycomb.
Mar 13, 2023   |  By Charity Majors
I'm no stranger to ranting about deploys. But there's one thing I haven't sufficiently ranted about yet, which is this: Deploying software is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way to go about the process of changing user-facing code. It sucks even if you have excellent, fast, fully automated deploys (which most of you do not). Relying on deploys to change user experience is a problem because it fundamentally confuses and scrambles up two very different actions: Deploys and releases.
Mar 10, 2023   |  By Rebecca Carter
When you’re just getting started with observability, a proof of concept (POC) can be exactly what you need to see the positive impact of this shift right away. Coveo, an intelligent search platform that uses AI to personalize customer interactions, used a successful POC to jumpstart its Honeycomb observability journey—which has grown to include 10,000+ machine learning models in production at any one time. Wondering how Coveo got there? So were we.
Mar 7, 2023   |  By Jessica Kerr
When we work at it, professionals are pretty good at analysis. We can break down a simple system, look at its parts and their relations, and master it. Given enough time and teammates, we can analyze a very complicated system and fix it when it breaks. But complex systems don’t yield to analysis. We have to add another skill: sense-making. Complex systems have parts that learn and change, with relations that vary with state and history. They respond to and influence their environment.
Mar 3, 2023   |  By Martin Thwaites
So you're used to debugging systems using a distributed trace, but your system is about to introduce a message queue—and that will work the same… right? Unfortunately, in a lot of implementations, this isn't the case. In this post, we'll talk about trace propagation (manual and OpenTelemetry), W3C tracing, and also where a trace might start and finish.
Mar 1, 2023   |  By Rebecca Carter
Distributed tracing enables you to monitor and observe requests as they flow through your distributed systems to understand whether these requests are behaving properly. You can compare tiny differences between multiple traces coming through your microservices-based applications every day to pinpoint areas that are affecting performance. As a result, debugging and troubleshooting are simpler and faster.
Feb 25, 2023   |  By Rebecca Carter
Imagine a universe in which a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) sets Guinness World Records for the size of its online space battles—and that game is built on 20-year-old code. Well, imagine no more. Welcome to the world of EVE Online, where hundreds of thousands of players interact across 7,800+ star systems and participate in more than one million daily market transactions.
Feb 23, 2023   |  By Rebecca Carter
Growing pains can be a natural consequence of meteoric success. We were reminded of that in our recent panel discussion with SumUp’s observability engineering lead, Blake Irvin, and senior software engineer Matouš Dzivjak. They shared how SumUp’s rapid growth spurt compelled them to change their resolution process—both logistically and culturally—to ensure a service level quality that reflects their customer obsession.
Mar 20, 2023   |  By Honeycomb
Ops and DevOps roles as we know them are on their way to becoming extinct—the future is platform engineering. While DevOps engineers typically focus on the application layer, platform engineers focus on the underlying infrastructure layer. Without a solid and reliable platform, it can be challenging to deploy and maintain software applications effectively. This can result in downtime, poor performance, and security vulnerabilities. Platform engineering enables software applications and services to run effectively and efficiently and has a direct impact on the user experience and the success of the entire organization.
Apr 1, 2022   |  By Honeycomb
In this 3-minute video, you’ll see how Honeycomb’s actionable SLOs can help you get to the source of an issue faster. Using a real production SLO (latency per-event) as an example, we walk you through what exhaustion time alerts are and how to configure them, as well as how to use a heatmap to investigate and take action when things happen.
Apr 1, 2022   |  By Honeycomb
In this 3-minute video, you’ll learn how to use heatmaps to visualize a large number of events over different time buckets. This video also covers how you can combine heatmaps with Honeycomb’s BubbleUp feature to speed up your debugging workflow.
Apr 1, 2022   |  By Honeycomb
In this 3.5-minute video, we show you how to find all the details associated with your traces. You’ll also learn how you can navigate and customize the waterfall trace view in Honeycomb.
Dec 17, 2021   |  By Honeycomb
With Liz Fong Jones, Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb and Ryan Pedersen, Senior Solutions Engineer at CircleCI In this talk, you’ll learn how Honeycomb keeps its CircleCI workflow duration at about 10 minutes per build through parallelizing build steps, using native container builders per architecture, and tracing execution of the build to know where to optimize.
Dec 17, 2021   |  By Honeycomb
Danyel Fisher, User Data Expert at Honeycomb Honeycomb constantly ships new features to production, so it’s hard to keep up sometimes. In this session, we’ll look at recent highlights and the best new things you’ll want to know about and use.
Dec 17, 2021   |  By Honeycomb
With Brian Langbecker, Solution Architect at Honeycomb See how Honeycomb integrates distributed tracing into your debugging workflows, with no context switching required.
Dec 17, 2021   |  By Honeycomb
With David Pickavance, Senior Sales Engineer at Apollo GraphQL Learn how to use Honeycomb, Apollo Studio, and Open Telemetry to optimize GraphQL performance for a federated graph. See how to debug a federated GraphQL query across subgraphs and down to the database layer using Honeycomb.
Jul 12, 2021   |  By Honeycomb
The 2021 Observability Maturity Community Research report is the first year-over-year look at the observability landscape and how practices are evolving. And they are 3X more likely to deliver high customer satisfaction. Which practices make all the difference when it comes to advancing the impact of your observability practice? Honeycomb's VP of Engineering, Emily Nakashima leads a discussion with Redmonk Co-founder James Governor, Honeycomb CTO and Co-founder Charity Majors, and Eaze's Sr. Software Engineer, Joe Thackery.
Jun 22, 2021   |  By Honeycomb
presented at o11ycon+hnycon, June 9-10, 2021 Christine Yen, CEO & Co-founder @ Honeycomb, Peter Alvaro, Assistant Professor of Computer Science @ US Santa Cruz, Charity Majors, CTO & Co-founder @ Honeycomb The Future of Observability
Sep 30, 2020   |  By Honeycomb
Honeycomb is an event-based observability tool, but you can-and should-use metrics alongside your events. Fortunately, Honeycomb can analyze both types of data at the same time. When maturing from metrics-based application monitoring to an observability-based development practice, there are considerations that can make the transformation easier for you and your team.
Aug 24, 2020   |  By Honeycomb
Evaluating observability tools can be a daunting task when you're unfamiliar with key considerations and possibilities. This guide steps through various capabilities for observability tooling and why they matter.
Aug 11, 2018   |  By Honeycomb
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.

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.