Martin Thwaites

Dec 3, 2024 | infoq.com | Martin Thwaites

Transcript Thwaites: My name is Martin Thwaites. I'm first and foremost an observability evangelist. My approach to building systems is about how do we understand them, how do we understand them in production. I also work for a company called Honeycomb. A couple years before I worked for Honeycomb, I was contracted to a bank. I was brought in to start looking at a brand-new system for the bank: core banking systems, ledgers, all of that stuff, writing them from scratch, which is a task.

Nov 26, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Martin Thwaites |Rox Williams |Brian Chang |Tyler Helmuth

It’s very popular to push logs, in a formatted way, to the console output of an application (sometimes referred to as stdout). Although using a push-based approach like OTLP over gRPC/HTTP is preferred and has more benefits, there are many legacy systems that still use this approach. These systems typically use a JSON output for their logs. So, how do we get these JSON logs into a backend analysis system like Honeycomb that primarily accepts OTLP data?

Oct 22, 2024 | gotopia.tech | Martin Thwaites

Home Gotopia Articles Observability 2.... Charity Majors and James Lewis explore the evolution of observability and the challenges faced by software engineers. Charity introduces the concept of canonical logs, which enhances observability by systematically gathering and organizing contextual data throughout a request's lifecycle, leading to more structured debugging.

Aug 7, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Martin Thwaites

While investigating some issues users raised around the OpenTelemetry Collector running in AKS, I found a few nuances that are worth noting. In this article, I'll go over some changes you have to implement in your values.yaml to make it work for you. The Collector is the focal point for telemetry inside your cluster.

Jun 24, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Martin Thwaites

Having telemetry is all well and good—amazing, in fact. It’s easy to do: add some OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation libraries to your stack and they’ll fill your disks with data pretty quickly. However, having good telemetry data—data that’s curated into being useful—is something that is both cost-effective and represents good value. Observability is about getting answers about how your production system is functioning by using telemetry data.