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By Rox Williams
At O11yCon, we talked to engineering teams across the industry, and the numbers are starting to get genuinely wild: Mixpanel DevOps Engineer Eddie Bracho told us their engineering team is generating 50% more PRs than before AI came into the mix (sorry). That kind of velocity is exciting, but it's also a pressure test for every part of your stack that isn't writing code, including your observability practice. Here's what we're hearing from customers about how that's playing out.
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By Dan Juengst
AI agents are nondeterministic, multi-step, and opaque. When one fails in production, "the model said something weird" is the cheapest, most useless line in your incident postmortem. To debug agents the way they actually run, you need telemetry that captures all of it, in order, with enough context to reconstruct what happened. The OpenTelemetry GenAI Semantic Conventions give you a vendor-neutral way to do exactly that.
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By Charity Majors
IT’S HERE it’s here it’s here it’s here!!!! The second edition of Observability Engineering is available for download, and since Honeycomb is the sponsor, you can now download it from our website (the dead tree version will take another month). This is a strange time to be writing a book.
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By Dan Juengst
A few weeks ago I wrote about a customer’s refund request that stopped halfway through at 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday night. That post walked through the 40 minutes it took to work out what happened when an agentic application had a problem: a tool retried against a rate-limited payments API, the error responses filled up the context window, and the agent gave up. The whole reason we built Agent Timeline was to turn that 40 minutes into five. To reduce MTTR. To solve the problem and get back to sleep.
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By Colin Burke
Observability has always been important, and much like any core capability in your business, the value needs to be understood. For years, the value of observability was predictable. It was uptime, error rates, MTTR, and likely tool consolidation. That was enough to be able to show progress. These are foundational, tablestakes metrics—and they still matter, but they aren’t enough.
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By Liz Fong-Jones
This is the fourth installment in the Graviton retrospective series we've been writing since 2021. The methodology is the same one I always reach for: hold the workload constant, run both generations on the same Kubernetes namespace concurrently, and let the per-pod numbers speak.
The OpenTelemetry Collector is usually deployed as a long-running process: a sidecar, a DaemonSet, an EC2 instance, a docker container on my computer. It sits there listening for telemetry. That's fine when I want to send telemetry all day, but not when telemetry is rare. Like right now, when I have an agent defined on AgentCore, and it runs a few times a week maybe. Or my website that hardly sees any traffic. Can I run the OpenTelemetry Collector as a Lambda function?
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By Austin Parker
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Charles Goodhart, 1975 You’ve probably read this quote in relation to any number of things over the years. People complaining about arbitrary metrics like PRs merged, lines of code produced, and now, token usage. But is the era of tokenmaxxing over before it even began? The rise of token leaderboards to the death of token leaderboards at companies like Amazon seem to have taken place in less than three months!
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By Sara Cave
You'd think that working at an observability company means everyone knows exactly where to find everything in the data. It doesn't. Especially not on the support team. We're the ones who get the tickets. We're in the telemetry every day trying to figure out what went wrong for a customer, and we do that by pointing Honeycomb at itself. Here's how that actually works, and how it's changed.
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By Ken Rimple
We just wrapped O11yCon 2026, and this year's conversations hit differently. Agent-based software development is here, now. It's no longer an optional choice, and everybody is struggling to understand what their agents are doing and how to make them cost less and perform better. Over the course of fifteen talks, we saw clearly that the old assumptions on how and who (or what) writes our software has been upended. Here are some highlights. We'll have videos available in the near future.
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By Honeycomb
At Slack, between 100 to 200 users per day use Honeycomb for client observability, tracing, instrumentation, analysis of performance, frontend issues, investigating incidents, or just looking into production issues.
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By Honeycomb
Watch Nathen Harvey's full talk at O11yCon 2026, Honeycomb's observability conference, and enjoy Christine Yen's intro as well.
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By Honeycomb
In this demo, Liz and Kale talk through a slow query that Liz couldn't get out of her head. During a conference, she set out to solve it... and ended up finding two more bugs to fix with, Honeycomb MCP, and Honeycomb Canvas.
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By Honeycomb
In her talk at O11yCon 2026, Nishi Bhonsle of Salesforce talked about,, and provided some great examples of how Honeycomb has helped Salesforce issues in seconds. Here's a 4-minute highlight reel.
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By Honeycomb
Honeycomb has shipped a production integration with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, surfacing agent telemetry directly in Agent Timeline, Honeycomb's trace view for behavior. It's available now and built on.
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By Honeycomb
Honeycomb and Embrace are extending the rigorous, data-driven practice that Honeycomb pioneered for foundational to mobile and web, giving, site reliability, and platform teams a complete, correlated picture of system health. The strategic partnership makes understanding performance and reliability for every user and every screen part of the observability practice, bringing new depth and standardization to how teams measure end user impact.
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By Honeycomb
Honeycomb's Innovation Week: Observability for the Agent Era (May 12-14) For Day 1 of Innovation Week, Honeycomb co-founders Christine Yen and Charity Majors will share what it actually takes to understand and debug systems in the agent era, and what the best engineering teams are doing differently. A 3-Day Virtual Event for Teams Building the Future May 12: Get insights on how the best engineering teams are tackling the challenges of the agentic era.
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By Honeycomb
Watch this video to see the re-imagined Canvas in action, where auto-investigation has already ranked your hypotheses before you open the tab, multiplayer agents build on each other's work in real time, and a custom skill encoding your team's own runbook can reprioritize the entire incident before you've had your morning coffee.
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By Honeycomb
Watch this video to see Agent Timeline in action: one conversation ID, one view, every agent invocation, LLM call, tool call, and downstream trace, so you stop stitching tabs together and start finding the failure in seconds.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.