Are you looking for a better way to troubleshoot, debug, and really see and understand what weird behavior is happening in production? Service-level objectives (SLOs) and observability can help you do all that—but they require collecting and storing the right data. If we’re naive with our telemetry strategy, we spend a lot of money on storing data without seeing adequate return on investment in the form of insights.

Honeycomb is all about collaboration: We believe that observability is a team sport, and we want to give you as many tools to help your team get the ball down the field (i.e., untangle knotty problems) as we can. We want you to be able to share the current state of your work so that others can follow and figure out what’s up, and we want you to leave breadcrumbs so the next time you’re stuck here, you can find your way back.

It’s easy to get started with Java and Honeycomb using OpenTelemetry. With Honeycomb being a big supporter of the OpenTelemetry initiative, all it takes is a few parameters to get your data in. In this post, I will walk through setting up a demo app with the OpenTelemetry Java agent and show how I was able to get rich details with little work by combining automatic instrumentation from the agent with custom instrumentation in the code.

This is my first week here as the first dedicated SRE for Honeycomb, and in a welcoming gesture, I was asked if I wanted to write a blog post about my first impressions and what made me decide to join the team. I’ve got a ton of personal reasons for joining Honeycomb that may not be worth being all public about, but after thinking for a while, I realized that many of the things I personally found interesting could point towards attitudes that result in better software elsewhere.

I’m delighted to announce that Honeycomb has raised $20M in Series B funding, led by e.ventures Growth, with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Storm Ventures, Next World Capital, and Merian Ventures, and joined by Industry Ventures. Honeycomb has led the conversation and momentum behind observability for years, and now we’re poised to scale the product, community, and practice even further.