At Honeycomb, we’re big fans of AWS Spot Instances. During a recent bill reduction exercise, we found significant savings in running our API service on Spot, and now look to use it wherever we can. Not all services fit the mold for Spot, though.

It’s an exciting time here at Honeycomb HQ—today, we’re thrilled to announce our recent fundraise led by Scale Venture Partners, and to welcome Ariel Tseitlin to our board.

In theory, Honeycomb is always up. Our servers run without hiccups, our user interface loads rapidly and is highly responsive, and our query engine is lightning fast. In practice, this isn’t always perfectly the case — and dedicated readers of this blog have learned about how we use those experiences to improve the product.

I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: observability is not a synonym for monitoring, and there are no three pillars. The pillars are bullshit.

Are you starting out on your journey toward observability? Do you have a mandate from management, or are you a lone warrior in the matrix? From your starting point, how will you make the right decisions about how to implement changes to your logging and aim for the right path through the various choices in front of you?

With 'Orange Is The New Black' (OITNB) wrapping its final season, let's reclaim the title formula 'x is the new y' with SINTO. This post explores tracing, monitoring, observability and business awareness. By understanding the difference in these four methods, you'll be ready to drive agile applications, gain funding for lowering technical debt, and focus on customer retention.

Greetings, fellow o11ynaut! You may recall a post we shared here about two months ago that told tales of the themes we felt best represented our recent release of the Framework for an Obsersvability Maturity Model. Well, the o11y maturity model was once again the primary topic and focus of Honeycomb’s most recent Observability Roundtable event held in San Francisco in mid August.

Today I wanted to write about something that’s been on my mind for the last few months. The industry spends quite a bit of time talking about observability these days and something’s been, somewhat vaguely, bothering me about it. So about a week or so ago, I spent some time figuring out what was bothering me and had some insights I would like to share.

Does your organization have an on-call rotation? Several members of the Honeycomb engineering team recently hosted a live webcast about why they never feel alone when on-call at Honeycomb.

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.”