Naming things, and specifically consistently naming things, is still one of the most useful pieces of work you can do in telemetry. It’s often overlooked as something that will just happen naturally and won’t cause too much of an issue—but it doesn’t happen naturally, it does cause issues, and you end up having to fix the data in pipelines or your backend tool.

Phorest wanted a tool to help foster a culture of observability among the engineers at an affordable and predictable price. With their application stack hosted on AWS, Phorest delivers a premier software solution that empowers their salon and spa business customers to thrive. Ensuring every engineer has access to an observability tool is integral to the company's success model, enabling them to deliver great code for their designated software services.

In this post, I describe how to send OpenTelemetry (OTel) data from an AWS Lambda instance to Honeycomb. I will be showing these steps using a Lambda written in Python and created and deployed using AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM).

There are countless challenges around incident investigations and reports. Aside from sensitive situations revolving around blame and corrections, tricky problems come up when having discussions with multiple stakeholders. The problems I’ll explore in this blog—from the SRE perspective—are about time pressures (when to ship the investigation) and the type of report people expect.

There is so much good work that OpenTelemetry has done in the software industry, specifically around the domain of observability, in the last five years. Bringing users and vendors together to define the future of telemetry? Check! Unify logs, traces, and metrics under a completely vendor-neutral API? Check! Deprecate other standards by bringing their collaborators to the table to ensure their use cases are met? CHECK!

In twenty years of software development, I did not have the privilege of being on call, of tending to my software in production. I’ve never understood what “APM” means. Anybody can tell me what it stands for—Application Performance Monitoring (or sometimes, the M means Management)—but what does it mean? What do people use APM for?

Birdie wanted to uplevel observability to a platform that would provide meaningful insights for application performance and debugging. Ensuring customers can provide seamless and timely care to in-home patients stands as a top priority for Birdie, and the development team takes pride in building and maintaining a high-quality platform distinguished by its reliability and responsiveness.

This post first appeared on Phillip's personal blog. Back in May 2023, I helped launch my first bona fide feature that uses LLMs in production. It was difficult in lots of different ways, but one thing I didn’t elaborate on in several blog posts was how lucky I was to have a coherent way to get the data I needed to make the feature useful for users.

Every business is a software business. And by software, we don’t mean code—we mean running software serving customers in production. Those customers may be internal to the company, they may pay you money, or they may represent attention that increases ad revenue—either way, making them happy is your business. And your fast, reliable software makes them happy. Application performance monitoring, also known as APM, represents the difference between code and running software.

We're delighted to introduce our new Ingest API Keys, a significant step toward enabling all Honeycomb customers to manage their observability complexity simply, efficiently, and securely. Ingest Keys are currently available for Environment & Services customers, with Classic support and programmatic key management capabilities under development and coming soon!