In March, we announced official support for a Honeycomb Terraform Provider. Today, we’re announcing additional support for managing Honeycomb Service Level Objectives (SLOs) with Terraform. This furthers Honeycomb’s support for configuration as code and it gives you programmatic control for an immensely popular Honeycomb feature.
It has been seven years since Rent the Runway posted their engineering ladder, kicking off a veritable trend of engineering teams open sourcing their ladders. Interestingly, nearly all of them seem to have coalesced around “area of scope” as a useful proxy for level. At first glance, “area of scope” does seem to make sense. Senior engineers should be able to work across larger areas of the organization. In addition, your area of influence should expand as you gain experience.
If you have an on-call rotation, you want it to be a healthy one. But this is sort of hard to measure because it has very abstract qualities to it. For example, are you feeling burnt out? Does it feel like you’re supported properly? Is there a sense of impending doom? Do you think everything is under control? Is it clashing with your own private life? Do you feel adequately equipped to deal with the challenges you may be asked to meet? Is there enough room given to recover after incidents?
As many of you may have read, Amazon has released C7g instances powered by the highly anticipated AWS Graviton3 Processors. As we shared at re:Invent 2021, we had the chance to take a little sneak peek under the Graviton3 hood to find out what even more performance will mean for Honeycomb and our customers.
Dear Miss O11y, I’ve been told I need to use the OpenTelemetry Collector, but I have no idea what it is, or why I need it? Should I be using it? What value does it add? What the hell am I missing?
More often than not, as developers, when we get a report that a large customer is hitting 502 errors, there's a flurry of activity. What's wrong? Is something deeply broken? So you start digging through AWS logs to see what you can find, but it's hard to reproduce. Sometimes, there's no clear answer, and you move on without any resolution. What if I told you it doesn't have to be this way?
Dear Miss O11y, How is modern observability using tracing, such as Honeycomb, different from the previous distributed tracing software I'm familiar with, like Dapper, at my company? I haven't really been able to wrap my head around Dapper. Does "advanced" observability mean that it's even more complicated than Dapper is? Auntie Alphabet.
The book is done. The book is FINISHED. There will be no more writing of the book! Holy macaroni. If you think you might be sensing just a SMIDGE of relief, you wouldn’t be wrong. We started writing this book, Observability Engineering: Achieving Production Excellence, three whole years ago, in the summer of 2019. Remember that?
When do you delete instrumentation? You delete instrumentation when you delete code. Other than that, if you’re doing things right: almost never. One of the best things about honeycomb is that it completely transforms the incentives around preserving instrumentation. With metrics-based tools, the most valuable metrics are always custom metrics. You need to define a custom metric for literally any question you might ever want to ask about the app and its utilization or performance.
Any significant shift in an organization’s software engineering culture has the potential to feel tectonic, and observability (o11y for short)—or more specifically, Observability Driven Development—is no different. Leaning into observability, which calls for tool-enhanced investigation, hypothesis testing, and data richness can be cumbersome even for the most veteran of teams.
