Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2025

Slicing Up-and Iterating on-SLOs

One of the main pieces of advice about Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is that they should focus on the user experience. Invariably, this leads to people further down the stack asking, “But how do I make my work fit the users?”—to which the answer is to redefine what we mean by “user.” In the end, a user is anyone who uses whatever it is you’re measuring.

Wiring Up a Next.js Self-Hosted Application to Honeycomb

Are you attempting to connect Honeycomb to a standalone (not hosted with Vercel) Next.js application? Most of the Next.js OpenTelemetry samples in the wild show how to connect Next.js to Vercel’s observability solution when hosting on their platform. But what if you’re hosting your own standalone Next.js server on Node.js? This blog post will get you started ingesting your Next.js application’s telemetry into Honeycomb.

Preempting Problems in a Sociotechnical System

Here at Honeycomb, we emphasize that organizations are sociotechnical systems. At a high level, that means that “wet-brained” people and the stuff they do is irreducible to “dry-brained” computations. That cashes out as the inability to ultimately remove or replace people in organizations with computers, in spite of what artificial general intelligence (AGI) ideologues would have you believe.

Stop Logging the Request Body!

With more and more people adopting OpenTelemetry and specifically using the tracing signal, I’ve seen an uptick in people wanting to add the entire request and response body as an attribute. This isn’t ideal, as it wasn’t when people were logging the body as text logs. In this blog post, I’ll explain why this is a bad idea, what are the pitfalls, and more importantly, what you should do instead.

Frontend Monitoring: Deliver Seamless and Performant User Experiences

88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad user experience. This means that addressing frontend issues such as slow load times, broken features, and unresponsive elements is crucial. Frontend monitoring helps development and IT teams proactively catch and resolve these issues to improve their user experience.

Why Observability 2.0 Is Such a Gamechanger

One of the hardest parts of my job is to get people to appreciate just how much of a difference Honeycomb/observability 2.0 is compared to their current way of working. It’s not just a small step up or a linear improvement. Rather, it’s an entire step change in the way that you write, deploy, and operate software for your customers.

Booking.com's Journey to Enhanced Observability

Since its early startup beginnings in Amsterdam, Booking.com has redefined the travel industry, establishing itself as a premier platform for millions of travelers worldwide. With over 28 million accommodation listings and a staggering 1.5 million room nights booked every day, Booking.com operates on a scale that demands a robust and constantly monitored infrastructure.