If you’ve been paying attention, you know that although collecting and reviewing metrics and logs is a core part of running a stable and successful service, access to raw events and the ability to search and pivot on any dimension of your production environment, no matter how high-cardinality, is what will help your team debug and troubleshoot new problems and outages more quickly.

We’ve seen folks do amazing things using our Honeycomb Beelines–getting their apps instrumented in next-to-no time, expanding their observability, growing their understanding of what is happening in their code in production. Now, prepare to do more with improved tracing support!

We recently shipped an update to navigating inside Honeycomb. Thus far, results have been positive – thank you! We wanted to give you a behind the scenes look at why and how this work came along. It’s easy to develop a certain blindness after working with your own code day-in day-out. Staring at something over a long period of time wears down the jagged edges that once used to protrude and now appear as normal.

Here at the Hive, we know that there’s nothing like getting your hands on something to see what using it to solve a problem is really like. In July, we launched the Gatekeeper tour, which walks you through the process of solving a real outage we experienced, using Honeycomb. That’s why we’re excited to launch a new place for you to play: the Tracing Tour at http://play.honeycomb.io.

Here at Honeycomb, we spend lots of time thinking about how to help our users be more awesome at unearthing insights from their data so they can solve production issues in real-time. We think a lot about how to make running a query easy, how to guide users to wield our Query Builder effectively to find the needles in the haystacks of data that they send us.