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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?
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
honeycomb.io | Rox Williams |Jessica Kerr |Kent Quirk
Many businesses rely on cloud infrastructure to power their software solutions. The cloud today makes it easier than ever to create services and components, increasingly the complexity of software. With more and often smaller processes, cloud-native architectures have driven the need for better insights into our software—a way to look into how these processes fit together.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
honeycomb.io | Rox Williams |Jessica Kerr |Kent Quirk
We’ve been talking about observability 2.0 a lot lately; what it means for telemetry and instrumentation, its practices and sociotechnical implications, and the dramatically different shape of its cost model. With all of these details swimming about, I’m afraid we’re already starting to lose sight of what matters. The distinction between observability 1.0 and observability 2.0 is not a laundry list, it’s not marketing speak, and it’s not that complicated or hard to understand.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
honeycomb.io | Rox Williams |Jessica Kerr |Liz Fong-Jones |Mei Luo
In the software space, we spend a lot of time defining the terminology that describes our roles, implementations, and ways of working. These terms help us share fundamental concepts that improve our software and let us better manage our software solutions. To optimize your software solutions and help you implement system observability, this blog post will share the key differences between logs vs traces. Logs are time-stamped records generated by software applications, services, or network devices.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
honeycomb.io | Brian Chang |Rox Williams
Since its inception in 2004, Lansweeper has been at the forefront of helping businesses understand, manage, and protect their IT devices and networks through a powerful IT asset management platform. As the platform grew from an on-premises solution to a cloud-based SaaS offering, Lansweeper expanded its reach to a global, multi-region customer base.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
honeycomb.io | Jessica Kerr |Liz Fong-Jones |Mei Luo |Rox Williams
Observability means you know what’s happening in your software systems, because they tell you. They tell you with telemetry: data emitted just for the people developing and operating the software. You already have telemetry–every log is a data point about something that happened. Structured logs or trace spans are even better, containing many pieces of data correlated in the same record. But you want to start from what you have, then improve it as you improve the software.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
honeycomb.io | Liz Fong-Jones |Mei Luo |Rox Williams
Let’s be real, we’ve never been huge fans of conventional unstructured logs at Honeycomb. From the very start, we’ve emitted from our own codestructured wide events and distributed traces with well-formed schemas. Fortunately (because it avoids reinventing the wheel) and unfortunately (because it doesn’t adhere to our standards for observability) for us, not all the software we run is written by us. And Kubernetes is a prime example of such a load-bearing part of our infrastructure.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
honeycomb.io | Rox Williams |Jessica Kerr |Liz Fong-Jones |Mei Luo
The best DevOps and SRE teams have shifted their approach to monitoring and logging their systems. These teams debug problems cohesively and rationally, regardless of the system’s complexity. Gone are the days of having a slew of logs that fail to explain the cause of alerts, system failures, and other unknowns. Implementing logging best practices is foundational for maintaining system integrity and performance in today’s complex IT environments.
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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.
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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.
