In today’s era of microservices, containers, and containerized applications, software architecture is more complex. Kubernetes is king in this environment, orchestrating an army of Docker containers in more distributed environments.

We’re really big fans of OpenTelemetry at Honeycomb. As we’ve blogged about before, OpenTelemetry is the next phase of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. Instead of working on separate but similar efforts, those two projects have merged to create OpenTelemetry. This is wonderful for the larger community as it gives people a clear way to instrument their code for metrics and traces that isn’t specific to any tool or vendor. OpenTelemetry is a CNCF sandbox project.

With the majority of the workforce working remotely due to COVID-19, DevOps teams are still focused on delivering reliable, performant services. In these challenging times, ensuring that infrastructure and applications are available at their highest level is even more imperative—and worthy of recognition. We are all in this together, and in the spirit of supporting each other, we are excited to announce our Observability All-Star program.

Over the last 10 years, the landscape that we manage, maintain, and control as operators and developers has changed dramatically. We’ve shifted from monolith to microservices, from bare metal to VMs to containers to function-based computing — and it’s changed how we need to approach monitoring and observability.

When it comes to complex application integrations, RED monitoring provides a sensible and necessary common element to see how our systems are performing and to alert us to behavior which is detrimental to your customers and your business goals. So, what is RED? RED stands for rate, errors, duration and is an offshoot of the Google Golden Signals.

“Sociotechnical” — I learned this word from Liz Fong-Jones recently, and it immediately entered my daily lexicon. You know exactly what it means as soon as you hear it, and then you wonder how you ever lived without it. Our systems are sociotechnical systems. This is why technical problems are never just technical problems, and why social problems are never just social problems. I work on a company, Honeycomb, which develops next-gen observability tooling.

In this guest article, SRE experts John Arundel and Andy Pearson show you how to connect your Checkly data to Prometheus and Grafana, as part of an integrated observability pipeline.

Grafana Labs cofounder and CEO Raj Dutt was a recent guest on the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), speaking to host Dan Woods about the benefits of observability. The conversation touched on several related topics – including the tactics of observability, platform approaches, and why now is a great time to be part of an open source company.

To have Observability is to have the ability to understand your system’s internal state based on signals and externally-visible output. Honeycomb’s approach to Observability is to strive toward this: every feature of the product attempts to move closer to a unified vision of figuring out what your system did, and how it got there.

In the fast-moving world of software development, as your product and organization grow and evolve, there are almost always competing priorities. Zeroing in on what is most important to your business in order to take it to the next level can at times seem like a non-stop process of trial and error. Oftentimes the customer who screams the loudest becomes a priority and gets the most focus.