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Observability

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

Ask Miss O11y: Pls ELI5 TLAs like PRO, SRE, and SLOs!

Dear Acronymically, I'll try to answer without using a single (new) acronym! First things first—"PRO" refers to our Pro plan, rather than being an acronym in and of itself. Honeycomb Pro is our cost-effective offering for professionals like you who are running a few production workloads! And we're hoping that folks will get even more benefit now that they have access to our SLO feature!

Observability for State and Local Government: Top 3 Challenges and How Monitoring Can Help

State and local governments require a high level of performance and reliability for the millions of people accessing their web applications every day. The talent shortage and lack of resources to train their staff on how to use new technologies prevents them from drawing valuable insights from modern IT environments. IT infrastructure monitoring allows state and local governments to stay ahead of technology trends and face common challenges with intelligence and transparency.

Who Owns Observability In Enterprises?

It’s common sense. When a logstorm hits, you don’t want to be left scrambling to find the one engineer from each team in your organization that actually understands the logging system – then spending even more time mapping the logging format of each team with the formats of every other team, all before you can begin to respond to the incident at hand. It’s a model that simply won’t scale.

Honeycomb Pro: Now With Metrics & SLOs

Honeycomb Pro is about to get even better. Starting today, all Pro accounts have access to Honeycomb Metrics and two Service Level Objectives (SLOs), previously only available to Enterprise accounts. Full disclosure: Later this month, the price of Pro plans will be increasing as well (see below). However, existing Pro customers (including those that sign up before the new pricing goes into effect) will be able to enjoy the new capabilities at existing prices for a full year, until April 2023!

Logging Best Practices - MDC, Ingestion and Scale

I don’t care about religious wars over “which logger is the best”. They all have their issues. Having said that, the worst logger is probably the one built “in-house”… So yes, they suck, but re-inventing the wheel is probably far worse. Let’s discuss making these loggers suck less with proper usage guidelines that range from the obvious to subtle. Hopefully, you can use this post as the basis of your company’s standard for logging best practices.

Application observability made easier for Compute Engine

When IT operators and architects begin their journey with Google Cloud, Day 0 observability needs tend to focus on infrastructure and aim to address questions about resource needs, a plan for scaling, and similar considerations. During this phase, developers and DevOps engineers also make a plan for how to get deep observability into the performance of third-party and open-source applications running on their Compute Engine VMs.

A primer to understanding observability

The one certainty you will find in IT, developer, and SRE roles is that things always change! One hot topic in DevOps communities is observability. A long word, you may be wondering what it really means and how you can add it to your skillset. Here’s a quick primer to get you going on your path to observability.

Honeycomb Service Level Objectives (SLOs)

In this 3-minute video, you’ll see how Honeycomb’s actionable SLOs can help you get to the source of an issue faster. Using a real production SLO (latency per-event) as an example, we walk you through what exhaustion time alerts are and how to configure them, as well as how to use a heatmap to investigate and take action when things happen.