If I’m used to metrics, how should I think about events in Honeycomb? This question cuts to the heart of how Honeycomb is different from other vendors in the APM and metrics space who claim to provide tools that help teams achieve observability, and we hear variations on it fairly often.

I’m Honeycomb’s newest engineer, now on my eighth week at Honeycomb. Excitingly, I did my first week of oncall two weeks ago! Almost every engineer at Honeycomb participates in oncall, and I chose to join in the tradition. This may seem unconventional for a Developer Advocate — surely my time might be better spent holding more meetings with customers and giving more talks? Yet, I found that being oncall was the right decision for me.

Most modern web apps end up sprouting some subset of tasks that happen in the “background”, i.e., when a user is not directly waiting on the request from a server to finish. These types of tasks range across all kinds of use cases – processing media, generating aggregate statistics for later view in the front end, and syncing data to 3rd party providers are just a few of many examples.

“We can know one thing: shit’s gonna fail.” Last week we participated in SRECon Americas, held across three days of intensive learning with practitioner talks, hands-on workshops, socializing, and of course vendor booths. Now in its third year, attendees numbered 650 with an additional ~300 from sponsors and organizers.