For many of us in the software development world, observability tools are a must-have for effectively debugging applications and infrastructure. And doing the job right means selecting the right observability tool. Some might look for a fully featured enterprise solution, while others may simply search for the best open-source solution. But regardless of your approach, you have a number of considerations when selecting the right observability tool.

You know the old saying, I’m sure: “April deploys bring May joys.” Okay, maybe it doesn’t go exactly like that, but after reading what we’ve been up to for the past month, I think it might be time for an update. Let’s dive into our Feature Focus April 2023 edition.

Code instrumentation is closely tied to debugging. Ask one of the experienced developers and they will swear by it for their day-to-day debugging needs. With modest beginnings in the form of print statements that label program execution checkpoints, present-day developers employ a host of advanced techniques for code instrumentation. When carried out in the right way, it improves developer productivity and also reduces the number of intermediate build/deployment cycles for every bug fix.

Elasticsearch is used for a wide variety of data types — one of these is metrics. With the introduction of Metricbeat many years ago and later our APM Agents, the metric use case has become more popular. Over the years, Elasticsearch has made many improvements on how to handle things like metrics aggregations and sparse documents. At the same time, TSVB visualizations were introduced to make visualizing metrics easier.

The Reliability industry needs a managed, non-vendor lock-in answer to spiraling costs, high cardinality and the toil of managing a tsdb.

Much has been said and written recently about observability, but it's more than just another buzzword. Often, the term is used interchangeably (and incorrectly) with “visibility” to describe viewing one's data. However, observability goes a step beyond, allowing you to gain insights from various logs, metrics and traces. While many software vendors are using the term, there are different viewpoints on the actual definition. So, what exactly is observability?

After the craziness of the last few years, who can blame IT, DevOps, and operations teams for wanting more stability in their personal lives and jobs? Yet the message from the top isn’t in line with this: Gartner reports over 94% of CEOs aim to accelerate pandemic-era digital transformation and are investing 5.1% more into IT budgets. This means threading a delicate balance between stability and scalability.

Engineers know best. No machine or tool will ever match the context and capacity that engineers have to make judgment calls about what a system should or shouldn’t do. We built Honeycomb to augment human intuition, not replace it. However, translating that intuition has proven challenging. A common pitfall in many observability tools is mandating use of a query language, which seems to result in a dynamic where only a small percentage of power users in an organization know how to use it.

Cloud native is the de facto standard approach to deploying software applications today. It is optimized for a cloud computing environment, fosters better structuring and management of software deployments. Unfortunately, the cloud native approach also poses additional challenges in code instrumentation that are detrimental to developer productivity.