I can’t believe that OpenObservability Talks podcast is already celebrating its second anniversary. It feels like just yesterday I wrote the summary of the summary of the first year, sharing the hectic times of starting a podcast in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The pandemic has been with us most of this year too, but it didn’t stop us from bringing the latest on the best of breed open source observability.

I’m Phillip, a product manager here at Honeycomb. After eleven-ish months of working on our product, I totally understand observability, right? ...Kinda? Sorta? Maybe? I'm not sure—but, I have been sitting in this space long enough to be a little better than clueless. Here's my guide on the topic. I hope it helps, especially if you’re passionate about exploring alternative ways you or your team can manage today’s cloud-native applications.

I’m thrilled to announce today that Logz.io has been named a Visionary in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability. Gaining this recognition from these leading industry experts, in my opinion, is an outstanding accomplishment for our entire organization – the product of years of hard work and putting the needs of our 1,300-plus customers first.

We are excited to announce that Elastic has been recognized as a Visionary in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for APM and Observability for the second year in a row. In addition, the Elastic solution scored among the Top 3 vendors in five out of six use cases in the 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for APM and Observability.

Gartner® has published the 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for APM and Observability, an annual report that evaluates vendors in this category. We’re honored that Datadog has been recognized as a “Leader” within this Magic Quadrant report for the second consecutive year, with the highest position for Ability to Execute.

Honeycomb ruffled the first of many feathers nearly seven years ago when we coined the term “observability” in talking about production code. Today, we get to celebrate a major victory in our push for the term to break free from its unsuitable parent category, Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

Monitoring is often not the first thing on the mind of the modern developer. Yet, it’s necessary at many points of the software development lifecycle, including: before deprecating an API, before launching a new feature, after launching the feature, and more. In fact, monitoring needs can vary much more than the classic Ops monitoring. My podcast guest Liran Haimovitch is the co-founder and CTO of Rookout, a live data collection and debugging platform.

As the applications we support evolve, so too must the services that keep them reliable and secure. And, evolve they have! Sumo Logic started life over a decade ago by solving the difficult problem of log management. Our cloud-native architecture eliminated the hassle of managing on-premise log management solutions while scaling on-demand to handle a significant volume of high-cardinality data. Powerful search made exploratory investigation fast and efficient for customers. This was a game changer!

I use .NET and I keep seeing something called `Activity` but in OpenTelemetry there is only talk about “Span” and “Trace,” why? And what should I be using? This is understandable, and has caused confusion since that decision was made by Microsoft back in 2018/19 (I believe). I’ll do my best to provide some guidance on what the distinction is, and also when each is useful.