TL;DR: startSpan is easier and measures a duration. Use it if your work won’t create any subspans. startActiveSpan requires that you pass a callback for the work in the span, and then any spans created during that work will be children of this active span. I’m instrumenting a Node.js app with OpenTelemetry, and adding some custom instrumentation. For this important activity that I’m doing (let’s call it “retrieve number”), I’m creating a custom span.

Those of us of a certain age know well the saying “Nobody got fired for buying IBM.” In the log analysis and security world, we’ve become lucky to get to the point where people are saying “Nobody gets fired for buying Splunk.” Our success in these areas has definitely created a perception for what products Splunk has and what we can offer to our customers. The problem is that most of these perceptions don’t capture the full power of Splunk.

Software developments take place quickly as per the client’s requirements. The developments need to take place with safety and precautions. DevOps engineers can help into this matter; however, it is not possible without Observability.

We’re well into 2022, and it’s full steam ahead addressing challenges and moving IT and SRE projects to completion. Are you ready for the challenges ahead of you? Do you feel prepared to handle the work you know about…and the work that’s sure to come your way? Are you ready for the end-of-the-year budget planning process that will be here before you know it? To help, I’d like to share my learnings from 20+ years in IT.

Previously announced as a community-led project, the Terraform provider for Honeycomb is now officially maintained by Honeycomb in partnership with Hashicorp. We recognize how valuable supporting configuration as code is for our customers, and this change in ownership affirms our commitment to ensuring your ability to quickly make the most of Honeycomb’s Management API.

Race conditions can occur when a multithreaded application accesses a shared resource using over one thread. Unless we have guards in place, the result might depend on which thread “got there first”. This is especially problematic when the state is changed externally. A race can cause more than just incorrect behavior. It can enable a security vulnerability when the resource in question can be corrupted in the right way. A good example of race condition vulnerabilities is mangling memory.

Companies depend on observability insights to provide reliable online services to their customers. To support their efforts, StackState is proud to announce a new version of our unique topology-powered observability software, StackState v4.6, available now. This new version brings powerful new capabilities to DevOps and SRE teams who need to maintain a deep understanding of how their stack is behaving to meet their SLOs.

Today, cloud native technologies empower a number of organizations to build and run scalable applications in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Developer and operation teams can build and deploy applications, APIs and microservices architectures with the speed and immutability of containers. Gartner predicts that by 2024, more than 75% of large enterprises in mature economies will be using containers in production.

Customers expect seamless digital experiences. But growing complexity and lack of unified full-stack observability create challenges for the whole organization.