We had an excellent time at PagerDuty Summit 2019. The folks we met at the booth and in the hallway track felt particularly kindred to Team Honeybee: we’ve all been on-call, and we all want it to be better. The main themes of the conference revolved around best practices and learnings for finding issues faster, knowing exactly what to do in an incident, enabling on-call to know how to prioritize an alert, and what our community can do to improve on-call life.

At Honeycomb, we’re big fans of AWS Spot Instances. During a recent bill reduction exercise, we found significant savings in running our API service on Spot, and now look to use it wherever we can. Not all services fit the mold for Spot, though.

It’s an exciting time here at Honeycomb HQ—today, we’re thrilled to announce our recent fundraise led by Scale Venture Partners, and to welcome Ariel Tseitlin to our board.

In theory, Honeycomb is always up. Our servers run without hiccups, our user interface loads rapidly and is highly responsive, and our query engine is lightning fast. In practice, this isn’t always perfectly the case — and dedicated readers of this blog have learned about how we use those experiences to improve the product.

I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: observability is not a synonym for monitoring, and there are no three pillars. The pillars are bullshit.

Are you starting out on your journey toward observability? Do you have a mandate from management, or are you a lone warrior in the matrix? From your starting point, how will you make the right decisions about how to implement changes to your logging and aim for the right path through the various choices in front of you?

With 'Orange Is The New Black' (OITNB) wrapping its final season, let's reclaim the title formula 'x is the new y' with SINTO. This post explores tracing, monitoring, observability and business awareness. By understanding the difference in these four methods, you'll be ready to drive agile applications, gain funding for lowering technical debt, and focus on customer retention.

Greetings, fellow o11ynaut! You may recall a post we shared here about two months ago that told tales of the themes we felt best represented our recent release of the Framework for an Obsersvability Maturity Model. Well, the o11y maturity model was once again the primary topic and focus of Honeycomb’s most recent Observability Roundtable event held in San Francisco in mid August.