Hey, observability friends. I’m Shelby. I joined Honeycomb back in March. This year I’m carrying the torch of our annual tradition, looking back at the Year Bee-hind Us. Cue up the Auld Lang Syne. This wasn’t easy to write. Everyone at Honeycomb has been affected by the events of this year: the pandemic plus lockdown, school closures, complete life upheaval. We’ve witnessed or directly experienced racist injustice, social unrest, and state violence.

We’re here at last: the final days of 2020. Let’s take a look back at this year’s most popular Honeycomb blog posts.

Getting started with observability (o11y) is now easier than ever with the new step-by-step o11yday Bootcamp guide. Now’s a great time to try out Honeycomb, get help if you’re stuck, and pick up a few holiday presents along the way.

OpenTelemetry has evolved so much since the 2019 KubeCon North America in San Diego, where I live-demoed OpenTelemetry on the keynote stage and highlighted our alpha to the world. We’re excited to be entering general availability of our Collector and Tracing SDKs soon. While I missed the energy from the packed crowd of over 10,000 technologists cheering me on, it was wonderful that this year’s event was more accessible than ever to a worldwide audience.

Today, AWS announced enhancements for AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. We’re working with AWS to build in additional support from partners. In tandem with that launch, Honeycomb is announcing support for event ingestion using OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). With that change, you can simplify management overhead and configuration by no longer needing to maintain a separate OpenTelemetry exporter.

While JavaScript frameworks come and go, a change has been brewing over the last several years that will permanently change what it means to be a modern developer: how our code goes from our laptops to the wild.

‘Tis the season to set 2021 goals. Whether setting OKRs, KPIs, KPAs, MBOs, or any other flavor of goal-setting frameworks in an endless sea of acronym soup, chances are that you’re still dealing with a sizable disconnect between business objectives and daily engineering work. Service Level Objectives (SLOs) have boomed in popularity because they provide a common language between business stakeholders and engineers to set aligned goals.