Welcome to a fresh new Honeycomb navigation! At the hive, we’ve been working on making navigating your Honeycomb environment simpler and more intuitive, and just deployed some changes that we hope you’ll agree have made progress toward that goal.

This week we’re shipping a few changes to our Query Builder interface. While they may appear small, they are the first steps in a larger plan that will help you more easily share your own observations about queries with your teammates, all around Honeycomb.

It wasn’t until the conference was ending that we learned that everybody thought we were kinda nuts.

Nobody knows your services/infra better than you, not even Honeycomb. If there’s one maxim for Honeycomb, it’s that context is king. Context determines the questions you can ask. The only way to make complex systems truly tractable is to make all questions possible. Ergo: more context. Context everywhere. Context coming out of the walls. You should be awash in context.

When we released derived columns last year, we already knew they were a powerful way to manipulate and explore data in Honeycomb, but we didn’t realize just how many different ways folks could use them. We use them all the time to improve our perspective when looking at data as we use Honeycomb internally, so we decided to share. So, in this series, Honeycombers share their favorite derived column use cases and explain how to achieve them.

Now Java developers can leverage Honeycomb to gain insight into the behavior of their apps and services by using an SDK similar to the ones we’ve already released for Go, Python, Javascript and Ruby.