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Observability

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

Honeycomb Play: Test Drive Honeycomb Without Signup or Setup

Honeycomb Play is an interactive sandbox that lets users explore Honeycomb’s data-enriched UI through a guided scenario. The hands-on experience takes a deep dive into how Honeycomb enables you to identify issues, assess their impact, and diagnose their causes for remediation. There is no requirement to sign up—simply dive in and get started right away!

Moving from an IT and Security Data Admin to an Observability Engineer

Join Ed Bailey, Nick Heudecker, and Jordan Perks as they discuss what it means to transition from acting simply as an IT and security data administrator to becoming a true observability engineer. In your role as an observability engineer, you’ll guide an organization on observability data best practices, enhance existing tool functionality, help control cost, and improve overall compliance.

Authors' Cut-Not-So-Distant Early Warning: Making the Move to Observability-Driven Development

This is how the developer story used to go: You do your coding work once, then you ship it to production—only to find out the code (or its dependencies) has security or other vulnerabilities. So, you go back and repeat your work to fix all those issues. But what if that all changed? What if observability were applied before everything was on fire? After all, observability is about understanding systems, which means more than just production.

An Engineer's Bill of Rights and Responsibilities

Power has a way of flowing towards people managers over time, no matter how many times you repeat “management is not a promotion, it’s a career change.” It’s natural, like water flowing downhill. Managers are privy to performance reviews and other personal information that they need to do their jobs, and they tend to be more practiced communicators.

An Introduction to OpenTelemetry and Observability

Cloud native and microservice architectures bring many advantages in terms of performance, scalability, and reliability, but one thing they can also bring is complexity. Having requests move between services can make debugging much more challenging and many of the past rules for monitoring applications don’t work well. This is made even more difficult by the fact that cloud services are inherently ephemeral, with containers constantly being spun up and spun down.

To Observability and Back Again: A Context's Journey

How do you pass context from events that concern Security teams to Development teams who can make changes and address those events? Often this involves a series of meetings and discussion that can take days or weeks to filter down from security event to developer awareness. Compounding the problem, developers generally do not have access to Splunk Core, Cloud or Enterprise indexes used by security teams, and indeed, may use only Splunk Observability for their metrics, traces and even logs.

The Real Opportunity for Improving Outcomes with Monitoring and Observability

If you were pulled into a meeting right now and asked to give your thoughts on how to achieve better outcomes with monitoring and observability, what would you recommend? Would you default to suggesting that your team improve Mean Time To Detect (MTTD)? Sure, you might make some improvements in that area, but it turns out that most of the opportunities lie in what comes after your system detects an issue. Let’s examine how to measure improvements in monitoring and observability.