Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Two years ago, Sentry built a metrics product that worked great on paper. But when we dogfooded it, we realized it was not what our customers really needed. Two weeks before launch, we killed the whole thing. Here’s what we learned, why classical time-series metrics break down for debugging modern applications, and how we rebuilt the system from scratch.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned at CloudZero, it’s that success in FinOps isn’t just about having the right tools. It’s about knowing how to use them, and understanding the “why” behind every number, dimension, and dashboard.

If you’ve ever tried to make sense of your AWS bill, you know how fast things get messy. Different accounts, hundreds of services, random tags, and suddenly, no one can say for sure who’s spending what or why the total looks so high. It’s not that teams don’t care about costs — it’s that AWS billing data isn’t always easy to interpret. Finance wants accountability. Engineering wants visibility. And somewhere between the two, ownership disappears.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 wrapped up in Atlanta last week, and it sure did feel like a big one for OpenTelemetry. Between Observability Day, the project updates, and the activity around the OpenTelemetry Observatory booth, you could feel how quickly the ecosystem is maturing.

Engineering leaders face a constant barrage of questions that pull them away from strategic work. A team lead asks about scorecard compliance. A PM wants a status update on a migration. Someone needs incident trend data for a quarterly review. Each question is reasonable. Each requires context switching, digging through dashboards, or pinging someone on your team for a report. What if you could just ask?

More and more enterprises are shifting toward private cloud and hybrid deployments for control, data residency, and security. At the same time, observability is no longer a “nice to have” tool. It's mission-critical for teams driving rapid change across cloud-native, multi-service architectures. Leaders are realizing they need deep visibility and rapid debugging everywhere their systems run.

In July, we introduced powerful new Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline features that helped teams take control of their observability data with safe sampling, flexible rehydration, and a visual pipeline builder. Since then, we’ve built on that foundation. Today, we’re introducing the latest enhancements to Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline, which give teams deeper visibility into pipeline health, more efficient access to archived telemetry data, and reduced operational complexity.