We are excited to announce a new version of the Honeycomb Beeline for Ruby! This new version solidifies our Ruby support, providing out-of-the-box automatic instrumentation for additional frameworks and enhanced support for our currently supported frameworks. The goods: For Rails applications we now have a generator that creates a configuration file for the Beeline. This generates a configuration file in config/initializers/honeycomb.rb with the Beeline pre-configured for your Rails application:

The Velocity conference happened recently, and as part of it we (Honeycomb) hosted a sort of reverse-panel discussion, where you talked, and we listened. You may be aware that we’re in the process of developing a maturity model for the practice of observability–and we’re taking every opportunity we have to ask questions and get feedback from those of you who are somewhere along the path.

A lot of product marketing is about telling people to throw away what they have in favor of something entirely new. Sometimes that is the right answer–sometimes what you have has completely outlived its usefulness and you need to put something better in its place–but a lot of the time, what’s realistic is to make incremental improvements. If you’ve been tasked with starting, or growing your observability practice, it may seem a long journey from here to there.

(Field notes from O’Reilly’s Velocity 2019 Show, San Jose.) It was steamy hot in San Jose during O’Reilly’s Velocity show and the normally frigid AC temps in the expo hall were welcomed by all attendees, escaping the 104 degree temps. It got so bad, Charity Majors labeled it Satan Jose and the nearby Marriott hotel experienced a power outage for almost two full days, leaving guests hot under more than just their collars.