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Honeycomb

Observable Frontends: the State of OpenTelemetry in the Browser

The modern standard for observability in backend systems is: distributed traces with OpenTelemetry, plus dynamic aggregations over these events. This works very well in the world of web servers. But what about the web client? This post describes the state of OpenTelemetry support for React web clients, as of early April 2023.

Should Every Incident Get a Retro?

At a recent training session, Jeli spent a great deal of time covering incident retrospectives and what makes an incident worthy of studying. My colleague Ben Hartshorne asked a fascinating question, which I’ll paraphrase here: That caught me by surprise. We had a great discussion, and it made me consider approaches I hadn’t before.

Cost-Cutting Strategies and Smart Tooling Choices to Maximize Your Vendor Budget

Tech debt. Vendor redundancy. System fragmentation. Startups and cloud–born companies are looking at vendors for cost-cutting opportunities. But how do you balance vendor costs and value when those resources and tools bring efficiencies as high as the monthly bills? In this session, Charity Majors and Gergely Orosz share advice on managing spend in a vendor-dependent world.

Alerting on the User Experience

When your alerts cover systems owned by different teams, who should be on call? We get this question a lot when talking about SLOs. We believe that great SLOs measure things that are close to the user experience. However, it becomes difficult to set up alerting on that SLO, because in any sufficiently complex system, the SLO is going to measure the interaction between multiple services owned by different teams.

Honeycomb's Deployment Protection Rule for GitHub Actions

Today, GitHub announced the public beta of Deployment Protection Rules for GitHub Actions for GitHub Enterprise users. In support of that launch, we’ve partnered with GitHub to create the Honeycomb Deployment Protection Rule (available as a GitHub App). This rule lets you run Honeycomb queries so that you can get real-time performance feedback from your services before deciding whether to prevent deployment of your code to a specific environment.

Achieving Great Dynamic Sampling with Refinery

Refinery, Honeycomb’s tail-based dynamic sampling proxy, often makes sampling feel like magic. This applies especially to dynamic sampling, because it ensures that interesting and unique traffic is kept, while tossing out nearly-identical “boring” traffic. But like any sufficiently advanced technology, it can feel a bit counterintuitive to wield correctly, at first. On Honeycomb’s Customer Architect team, we’re often asked to assist customers with their Refinery clusters.

Does OpenTelemetry in .NET Cause Performance Degradation?

Contrary to Betteridge’s Law of Tabloid Headlines, the answer to the question, "does OpenTelemetry in.NET cause performance degradation?" is yes, but context is important. I get this question so often that I thought it was time to get some stats on it. I’ve heard comments like: I can only assume that these are based on previous versions, or things like OpenTracing / OpenCensus (the heritage frameworks that were the feeders for OpenTelemetry).