As enterprise IT systems have become more complex and distributed due to cloud infrastructure, containers, serverless technology, an ever-growing footprint of applications and devices, IoT, SDN, open source development tools and more, the practice of performance monitoring has become far more nuanced. In these modern IT environments, traditional monitoring practices centered on known issues aren’t enough.

Are you currently dealing with complex and fast-changing Cloud & Container environments? If your answer to that question is yes, then you are probably looking for an easy solution that gives you complete control to make sense of all these fast and complex IT environments. In the dynamic world of microservices and containers, traditional monitoring solutions are no longer sufficient to provide needed visibilities to maintain healthy and happy environments.

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.

To leverage IT innovations like cloud computing, containers and microservices, and to meet customer experience expectations, IT teams must monitor their applications and services differently. The reason is that developers are deliberately disseminating information through their code in order to understand and manage the complexity in today’s ephemeral and dynamic environments.

“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 blog post will pit Grafana vs Graphite against each other, two of the most popular observability tools on the market today. R&D organizations typically implement a wide technology stack. They include varying services, systems, or tools to support their production and development environments. Most, if not all, of these companies have SLAs requiring R&D to provide high availability solutions and the ability to respond to incidents in real time.

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.

Here’s what happens when you obtain full-stack observability into your Cisco environment.

In part one, we introduced the duality of observability, controllability. As a reminder, observability is the ability to infer the internal state of a "machine” from externally exposed signals. Controllability is the ability to control input to direct the internal state to the desired outcome. So observability is a loop problem. And we need to stop treating it as the end state of our challenge in delivering performant, quality experiences to our users and customers.

A few months ago, Honeycomb released our SLO — Service Level Objective — feature to the world. We’ve written before about how to use it and some of the use scenarios. Today, I’d like to say a little more about how the feature has evolved, and what we did in the process of creating it. (Some of these notes are based on my talk, “Pitfalls in Measuring SLOs;” you can find the slides to that talk here, or view the video on our Honeycomb Talks page).