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The latest News and Information on Observabilty for complex systems and related technologies.

Refinery and EMA Sampling

Refinery is Honeycomb’s sampling proxy, which our largest customers use to improve the value they get from their telemetry. It has a variety of interesting samplers to choose from. One category of these is called dynamic sampling. It’s basically a technique for adjusting sample rates to account for the volume of incoming data—but doing so in a way that rare events get more priority than common events. Honeycomb’s query engine can compensate for sampling rates on a per-event basis.

Syncing PagerDuty Schedules to Slack Groups

We’ve posted before about how engineers on call at Honeycomb aren’t expected to do project work, and that whenever they’re not dealing with interruptions, they’re free to work on whatever will make the on-call experience better. However, all of our engineering rotations rely on hand-off meetings where they update the Slack groups with everyone who’s on call. During my last shift, a small problem kept causing friction for some of our incident management automation.

Investigate Performance issues with SLOs

When an alert goes off because a Service Level Objective (SLO) is in danger of violation, it comes with a lot of context about what has been going wrong and for how long. Then Honeycomb gives you tools to explore the where & why. Here, Martin Thwaites walks through an example of diagnosing slower performance. What service is the problem, and under what circumstances?

AI-Powered Observability: Picking Up Where AIOps Failed

GenAI promises evolutionary changes in how we use observability tools, but meeting expectations means heeding the lessons of our AIOps mistakes. The emergence of generative AI in observability tools was inevitable, but there’s already been an extreme degree of hype in the market. Monitoring, DevOps and ITOps have never been immune to trends, and with GenAI capabilities, the propagandahype machine is running out of control.

4 benefits of observability

Achieving modern observability with a unified data platform and Search AI If you have a love-hate relationship with your data, we don’t blame you. It’s generated at high velocity and from all sides — your apps, endpoints, networks, and servers. By 2025, global data creation is projected to grow by more than 180 zettabytes.* Inside this wealth of data lies better operational resilience, profitability, and innovation.

How to Set Up Real User Monitoring in SolarWinds Observability Platform

Learn how to set up Real User Monitoring in the SolarWinds Observability Platform to track and analyze the real-time performance of your website. This tutorial covers integrating Real User Monitoring with your website, setting performance thresholds, and configuring the tool for single-page applications. By the end, you'll know how to gain valuable insights into your end users' experience and optimize your website's performance.

Improve your observability strategy with AIOps

Change is the only constant in the IT landscape. These changes might involve adding new observability tools, retiring existing monitoring systems, establishing new business units, or integrating IT systems from acquisitions. Managing these changes can challenge even expert ITOps teams. Organizing your monitoring setup can seem overwhelming, especially with issues like monitoring gaps, observability redundancy, complex toolsets, or significant technical debt.

Cloud Observability vs Monitoring: A Practical Guide to Go Beyond Cloud-Native Tools

As organizations move their application workloads to the cloud, understanding the difference between cloud observability vs monitoring is crucial to ensure optimal performance and seamless operations. While both concepts are often mentioned in tandem, they serve different purposes, and mastering each can help organizations thrive in increasingly complex cloud environments.