Observability is more than tooling. Of course having the right tools in place so you can ask arbitrary questions about your environment, without having to know ahead of time what you wanted to ask, is critical. Finding the unknown unknowns is the coveted observability sweet spot. However, it’s the actual doing it that proves a bit more challenging especially when you’re weaning off legacy tools.

We are excited to announce a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to bring real-time observability into Google Cloud Services and modern applications for our joint customers. Cloud has become essential to modernizing IT environments and enabling the digital initiatives of organizations large and small. Organizations undertake IT modernization – including cloud adoption – to accelerate innovation and increase operational efficiency while optimizing IT spend.

After StatsD and Graphite weren’t able to meet their needs for metrics and monitoring, engineers at SoundCloud developed the open source event monitoring and alerting tool, Prometheus. Because it’s easy to deploy and get started with -- and on the surface seems free -- it’s become a popular part of many DevOps teams' observability stack.

Today, I’m excited to announce the Open Observability Conference – a virtual event on May 27th at 11:00am EDT providing a platform for learning, sharing and discussion of open source observability technologies for DevOps teams around the globe. Register for the Open Observability Conference here.

Starting today, you can use more of Honeycomb than ever before for free. That means more teams can start building up production excellence with features that were previously only available for paid subscribers.

If you hadn't heard the term “this is the new normal” yet today, then you haven't been listening. While right now is not normal, current events have us all wondering how the work environment is going to change once we get there. There are a few things that we can expect: Having pipelines and applications that are observable is key to all of this.

When Charity and I started pitching Honeycomb, we had a “bit” we would do, on the importance of building for teams: I’d identify her as the {Kafka, Mongo, insert tech-of-the-moment here} expert on the team, identify myself as the newcomer, and pantomime awkwardly leaning over her shoulder to see how she debugged some unexpected behavior.

“It turns out,” said Liz, “it was not a giant pile of work to start adding those rich instrumentation spans as you need them.” Liz Fong-Jones was telling dev.to’s Molly Struve about an error she encountered while trying to update her dev.to profile. When she entered honeycomb.io into the Employer URL field, the app responded with an angry red box...

As enterprise IT systems have become more complex and distributed due to cloud infrastructure, containers, serverless technology, an ever-growing footprint of applications and devices, IoT, SDN, open source development tools and more, the practice of performance monitoring has become far more nuanced. In these modern IT environments, traditional monitoring practices centered on known issues aren’t enough.