This guest post is from Evan Shaw, Lead Engineer at vendhq.com. GraphQL is a query language for APIs. It allows you to expose all your data through a single queryable graph. Compared to RESTful APIs, GraphQL brings greater flexibility in how your data is exposed, a more structured schema for type safety, and fewer round trips to your server for better latency. When we introduced a GraphQL at Vend, the feedback from our frontend engineers was clear: “This is a game-changer.”

“Nines don’t matter when users aren’t happy” is something you may have heard a time or two from folks here at Honeycomb. We often emphasize the fact that while your system can look healthy at a high level, deep down something is likely broken in ways that cause pain for users. If you are empowered to ask detailed questions about your services, you can find and understand these problems more easily.

AWS bills are notoriously complicated, and the Amazon Cost Explorer doesn’t always make it easy to understand exactly where your money is going. When we embarked on our journey to reduce our AWS bill, we wanted more than just the Cost Explorer to help us figure out where to optimize — and when all you have is a hammer, every problem sure looks like it can be solved with Honeycomb!

At Honeycomb, we’ve often discussed the value of making software deployments early and often, and being able to understand your code as it runs in production. However, these principles aren’t specific to only your customer-facing software. Configuration-as-code, such as Terraform, is in fact code that needs to go through a release process as well. Lacking formal process around Terraform deployment means a de-facto process that generates reliability risk.

We are excited to announce a new version of the Honeycomb Beeline for Ruby! This new version solidifies our Ruby support, providing out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation for additional frameworks and enhanced support for our currently supported frameworks. The goods: For Rails applications we now have a generator that creates a configuration file for the Beeline. This generates a configuration file in config/initializers/honeycomb.rb with the Beeline pre-configured for your Rails application:

The Velocity conference happened recently, and as part of it we (Honeycomb) hosted a sort of reverse-panel discussion, where you talked, and we listened. You may be aware that we’re in the process of developing a maturity model for the practice of observability–and we’re taking every opportunity we have to ask questions and get feedback from those of you who are somewhere along the path.

A lot of product marketing is about telling people to throw away what they have in favor of something entirely new. Sometimes that is the right answer–sometimes what you have has completely outlived its usefulness and you need to put something better in its place–but a lot of the time, what’s realistic is to make incremental improvements. If you’ve been tasked with starting, or growing your observability practice, it may seem a long journey from here to there.

(Field notes from O’Reilly’s Velocity 2019 Show, San Jose.) It was steamy hot in San Jose during O’Reilly’s Velocity show and the normally frigid AC temps in the expo hall were welcomed by all attendees, escaping the 104 degree temps. It got so bad, Charity Majors labeled it Satan Jose and the nearby Marriott hotel experienced a power outage for almost two full days, leaving guests hot under more than just their collars.

Observability-driven development requires both rich query capabilities and sufficient instrumentation in order to capture the nuances of developers’ intention and useful dimensions of cardinality. When our systems are running in containers, we need an equivalent to our local debugging tools that is as easy to use as Printf and as powerful as gdb.

This year was my third in a row attending (and now speaking at!) Monitorama. Because the organizers do a great job of turning introverts into extroverts for three days straight, it’s always a fun and exhausting time—but one of my favorite parts is how much folks continue talking about and sharing the content, days or weeks after it’s over. So, to continue the drumbeat, here were some of my highlights from this year.