Nick Travaglini

Featured in:

Articles

A CoPE’s Duty: Indexing on Prod

Sep 18, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Nick Travaglini |Brian Chang |Lex Neva

Building a center of production excellence (CoPE) starts with indexing on production. Here’s why. Odds are that a software engineer today is really focused on one place: pre-prod. Short for “pre-production,” this is slang for an environment where software code operates in a prototype phase of its development lifecycle. Common sense would have one believe that this is a safe space, a workbench of sorts, where problems can be found and remediated.
An Ode to Events

Sep 17, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Nick Travaglini |Brian Chang |Rox Williams

At this point, it’s almost passé to write a blog post comparing events to the three pillars. Nobody really wants to give up their position. Regardless, I’m going to talk about how great events are and use some analogies to try to get that across. Maybe these will help folks learn to really appreciate them and to depreciate a certain understanding of the three pillars. Or maybe not.
Is it Time to Version Observability? Signs Point to Yes

Sep 9, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Nick Travaglini |Brian Chang |Rox Williams

In 2016, we at Honeycomb first borrowed the term “observability” from the wikipedia entry for control systems observability, where it is a measure of your ability to understand internal system states just by observing its outputs. We then spent a couple of years trying to work out how that definition might apply to software systems. Many twitter threads, podcasts, blog posts, and lengthy laundry lists of technical criteria emerged from that work, including a whole ass book.
A CoPE’s Guide to Alert Management

Aug 15, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Nick Travaglini

Alerts are a perennial topic, and a CoPE will need to engage with them. The bounds of this problem space are formed by two types of alerts: Reactive alerts (in Honeycomb, we call these Triggers): They are alerts that fire after some event, like crossing a pre-determined boundary. Proactive alerts (Burn Alerts based on Honeycomb’s SLO feature): These give notice before crossing a threshold; in the case of SLOs, that means before failing to meet the stated objective.
Custom Instrumentation

Aug 8, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Nick Travaglini

The previous post laid out the basic idea of instrumentation and how OpenTelemetry’s auto-instrumentation can get teams started. However, you can’t rely only on auto-instrumentation. This post will discuss the limitations in more detail and how a CoPE can help teams overcome them. Once your teams begin working with telemetry from auto-instrumentation, they’ll soon realize something: it’s reeeeally barebones.
The CoPE and Other Teams, Part 1: Introduction & Auto-Instrumentation

Jul 25, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Nick Travaglini

The CoPE is made to affect, meaning change, how things work. The disruption it produces is a feature, not a bug. That disruption pushes things away from a locally optimal, comfortable state that generates diminishing returns. It sets things on a course of exploration to find new terrains which may benefit it more—and for longer. Laurent Hébert-Dufresne and his co-authors produced a model of social organization.
Independent, Involved, Informed, and Informative: The Characteristics of a CoPE

May 29, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Nick Travaglini

As our Field CTO Liz Fong-Jones says, production excellence is important for cloud-native software organizations because it ensures a safe, reliable, and sustainable system for an organization’s customers and employees. A CoPE helps organizations cultivate the practices and tools necessary to achieve that consistently. In part one of our CoPE series, we analogized the CoPE with safety departments.
Establishing and Enabling a Center of Production Excellence

May 15, 2024 | honeycomb.io | Nick Travaglini

Software is in a crisis. This is nothing new. Complex distributed systems are perpetually in a state far from equilibrium, operating in what Richard Cook has called a “degraded mode.” It’s through a combination of technical artifacts, organizational practices and policies, and pure gumption that they manage to maintain themselves through time. However, there are some organizations that seem to have an easier time of it than others.
Epic Incidents of History: The 1979 {NORAD} Nuclear near Miss

Feb 12, 2023 | usenix.org | Nick Travaglini

Nick Travaglini, Honeycomb.ioAbstract: Nov 9, 1979—An officer of the North American Air Defense Command unknowningly input dummy data into a computer system built to provide early warning of incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. This triggered a set of alerts at several military installations which signaled the imminent arrival of a major nuclear attack against the United States, probably launched by its rival superpower: the USSR.