When I joined Honeycomb two years ago, we were entering a phase of growth where we could no longer expect to have the time to prevent or fix all issues before things got bad. All the early parts of the system needed to scale, but we would not have the bandwidth to tackle some of them graciously. We’d have to choose some fires to fight, and some to let burn.

For a long time at Honeycomb, we envisioned using the tracing data you send us to generate a service map. If you’re unfamiliar, a service map is a graph-like visualization of your system architecture that shows all of its components and dependencies. We didn’t want it to be a static service map, though—the kind you’d view once before going “huh, neat”—and then never looking at it again.

For teams running secure web gateways (SWGs), also referred to as proxies, in today’s complex, dynamic network environments, extensive observability is a must have. Symantec offers a range of flexible deployment options for its SWGs, offering support for cloud, edge, and hybrid approaches. This blog explores a Broadcom solution that provides comprehensive observability for the Symantec edge offering, Symantec Edge SWG (formerly ProxySG).

Today, businesses are generating more data than ever before. However, with this data explosion comes a new set of challenges, including increased complexity, higher costs, and difficulty extracting value. With this in mind, how can organizations effectively manage this data to extract value and solve the challenges of the modern data stack?

In October 2022, we released SolarWinds® Observability, our cloud-native SaaS observability solution. For companies like Corevist, the solution provided them with the ability to define customized monitoring specifically configured to the Corevist instances within each customer deployment. For them, this was a major game changer.

We are thrilled to announce that we have been recognized as a Customers' Choice in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights 'Voice of the Customer' : Application Performance Monitoring and Observability.

Observability vs monitoring has been a common topic in DevOps recently. There has been a lot of debate, and I have learned a lot from them when I started my observability journey. Most literature on observability is associated with a particular product or shares a textbook definition. In this blog post, I want to give you a practical understanding of observability and the differences between observability and monitoring with different scenarios and examples. We will cover the following topics here.

In modern observability, Lucene is the most commonly used language for log analysis. Lucene has earned its place as a query language. Still, as the industry demands change and the challenge of observability grows more difficult, Lucene’s limitations become more obvious.

Grafana Faro and xk6-browser are both new tools within the Grafana Labs open source ecosystem, but the pairing is already showing a lot of potential in terms of frontend monitoring and performance testing. Faro, which was announced last November, includes a highly configurable SDK that instruments web apps to capture observability signals that can then be correlated with backend and infrastructure data.

When thinking about holistic end-to-end observability, it can help to start with what you already have. Many government agencies are already strategically ingesting and storing logs — a key component of observability. More than a year and a half after the release of M-21-31, US government agencies continue to work through the logging maturity models outlined in the memorandum.