As engineering teams shift from delivering services on monolithic architectures to microservices and even serverless environments, developers are no longer just responsible for creating and maintaining their code. Shared ownership has become the new normal (or at least trending towards) and so they are now responding to production incidents and in some cases in the on-call rotation. Of course incidents vary in terms of impact, but they do take time away from innovation and creating new capabilities.

Starting today, you can use more of Honeycomb than ever before for free. That means more teams can start building up production excellence with features that were previously only available for paid subscribers.

When Charity and I started pitching Honeycomb, we had a “bit” we would do, on the importance of building for teams: I’d identify her as the {Kafka, Mongo, insert tech-of-the-moment here} expert on the team, identify myself as the newcomer, and pantomime awkwardly leaning over her shoulder to see how she debugged some unexpected behavior.

“It turns out,” said Liz, “it was not a giant pile of work to start adding those rich instrumentation spans as you need them.” Liz Fong-Jones was telling dev.to’s Molly Struve about an error she encountered while trying to update her dev.to profile. When she entered honeycomb.io into the Employer URL field, the app responded with an angry red box...

I was excited to attend DevOpsDays in New York City in March of 2020, but then again, who wouldn’t be? A whole week in the Big Apple with Liz Fong and Christine Yen, yes, please! I joined Honeycomb as a product designer in January of 2020, making this my first event as a Honeycomb employee. In addition to meeting our users, it was a chance for me to talk with people just starting their observability journey. As a product designer, my focus is on improving the overall user experience.

“When things broke,” Molly explained, “you’re mad scrambling—jumping from website to website to website, trying to put the pieces together.” Molly was able to use Honeycomb to fix things up: “It makes my job easier as an SRE.” Getting started with Honeycomb doesn’t require a lot of work: at dev.to, they used the Ruby Beeline to get it going: “I didn’t do that much,” she said.

This is a guest post by Ryan Ordway, DevOps Engineer at Oregon State University. At Oregon State University Libraries & Press (OSULP) we have been using Honeycomb for about 18 months. We were in the beginnings of automating our infrastructure and needed an APM solution that we could scale with. New Relic was becoming too expensive, and we couldn’t afford to monitor our whole infrastructure and trace all of our applications anymore. Thus began our Observability journey.