Hey, observability friends. I’m Shelby. I joined Honeycomb back in March. This year I’m carrying the torch of our annual tradition, looking back at the Year Bee-hind Us. Cue up the Auld Lang Syne. This wasn’t easy to write. Everyone at Honeycomb has been affected by the events of this year: the pandemic plus lockdown, school closures, complete life upheaval. We’ve witnessed or directly experienced racist injustice, social unrest, and state violence.

We’re here at last: the final days of 2020. Let’s take a look back at this year’s most popular Honeycomb blog posts.

Getting started with observability (o11y) is now easier than ever with the new step-by-step o11yday Bootcamp guide. Now’s a great time to try out Honeycomb, get help if you’re stuck, and pick up a few holiday presents along the way.

OpenTelemetry has evolved so much since the 2019 KubeCon North America in San Diego, where I live-demoed OpenTelemetry on the keynote stage and highlighted our alpha to the world. We’re excited to be entering general availability of our Collector and Tracing SDKs soon. While I missed the energy from the packed crowd of over 10,000 technologists cheering me on, it was wonderful that this year’s event was more accessible than ever to a worldwide audience.

As we look ahead to 2021 and beyond, we can expect no shortage of opportunities to re-think IT for this era where digital infrastructure is critical to the survival of every business.

At the recent Illuminate conference, Dave Sudia from GoSpotCheck shared the process that led them to choosing Sumo Logic for their observability needs.

2021 is the year technologists have the biggest opportunity to elevate their careers and truly change the perception of the IT industry.

First of all: apologies...because although the title suggests otherwise, this blog is not about "Observability VS. Monitoring." It's a great misconception that observability is this hot new technology that's here to replace your monitoring tools.

Today, AWS announced enhancements for AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. We’re working with AWS to build in additional support from partners. In tandem with that launch, Honeycomb is announcing support for event ingestion using OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). With that change, you can simplify management overhead and configuration by no longer needing to maintain a separate OpenTelemetry exporter.

There’s an AI-led developer and operations (DevOps) evolution afoot which is stoking SREs’ increasingly critical efforts to assure and improve the customer experience by automating the toil out of observability. This movement feeds on a supercharged process of turning telemetry into actionable insight by automatically drawing anomalies, changes and events out of the full-stack event and telemetry data, and analyzing it for correlation and causality.