Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Two years ago, Sentry built a metrics product that worked great on paper. But when we dogfooded it, we realized it was not what our customers really needed. Two weeks before launch, we killed the whole thing. Here’s what we learned, why classical time-series metrics break down for debugging modern applications, and how we rebuilt the system from scratch.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 wrapped up in Atlanta last week, and it sure did feel like a big one for OpenTelemetry. Between Observability Day, the project updates, and the activity around the OpenTelemetry Observatory booth, you could feel how quickly the ecosystem is maturing.

More and more enterprises are shifting toward private cloud and hybrid deployments for control, data residency, and security. At the same time, observability is no longer a “nice to have” tool. It's mission-critical for teams driving rapid change across cloud-native, multi-service architectures. Leaders are realizing they need deep visibility and rapid debugging everywhere their systems run.

In July, we introduced powerful new Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline features that helped teams take control of their observability data with safe sampling, flexible rehydration, and a visual pipeline builder. Since then, we’ve built on that foundation. Today, we’re introducing the latest enhancements to Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline, which give teams deeper visibility into pipeline health, more efficient access to archived telemetry data, and reduced operational complexity.

Okay, I'm going to say something that would make 2016 Charity want to throw her laptop across the room: we're making a major investment in metrics at Honeycomb. I know, I know. "But Charity, you literally called them ‘shit salad!’" I did. Also "nerfed dimensions." I said they would "fucking kneecap you." For most of the past decade, I've been social media’s most reliable anti-metrics evangelist. Have I repented? No.