What fun is network observability if you can’t share what you see? That’s why we’ve added public link sharing to the Kentik platform. One of the greater missions of network observability is to break the boundaries of conventional monitoring. At Kentik, we focused our initial efforts on making complex infrastructure problems easy to visualize, understand and resolve. Now we’re tackling a follow-up mandate: to democratize network observability.

In today’s world, there’s no lack of monitoring data. In fact, the amount of data DevOps and SRE teams are dealing with on a daily basis can be confusing and overwhelming. Often, the problem is threefold.

The promise of OpenTelemetry is that it can help you avoid vendor lock-in by allowing you to instrument your applications once, then send that data to any backend of your choice. This post shows you exactly how to do that with code samples that configure your application to send telemetry data to both Honeycomb and New Relic.

While automating systems is seen as an imperative in boardrooms around the globe, automation teams — the teams on the ground — often lack the data to help them to industrialize their automation efforts and move from ad-hoc automation to strategic automation. In this automation-focused blog post, we will show how to instrument infrastructure automation with Elastic Observability.

KoolKits (Kubernetes toolkits) are highly-opinionated, language-specific, batteries-included debug container images for Kubernetes. In practice, they’re what you would’ve installed on your production pods if you were stuck during a tough debug session in an unfamiliar shell. To briefly give some background, note that these container images are intended for use with the new kubectl debug feature, which spins up Ephemeral containers for interactive troubleshooting.

Understanding everything that happens inside a production environment is a notoriously difficult task. Instana’s solution helps developers and DevOps become aware of problems quickly – problems that are rooted in both infrastructure-level information and application-level information. Lightrun, on the other hand, enables practitioners to drill deeper into line-by-line, debugger-grade information from your production systems – enriching the existing information Instana delivers.

Lightrun is the world’s first IDE-native observability platform. A developer-first product, Lightrun enables engineering teams to connect to their live applications and continuously identify critical issues without hotfixes, redeployments, or restarts. We are proud to announce the general availability of the Lightrun extension for Visual Studio Code, the popular IDE from Microsoft.

Ah, good question! TL;DR: store the start time of the span, and then create the span on the new page. Usually, you want to start a span, do some work, and then end the span. The whole span gets sent to your OpenTelemetry collector (and thence to Honeycomb) when you end it. But when a page load happens, that span object is lost. Honeycomb never hears about it becausespan.end()wasn’t called. How can we deal with this? Create the span only on the new page, where you can end it. But!

The rise of cloud native and containerization, along with the automation of the CI/CD pipeline, introduced fundamental changes to existing application development, deployment, and security paradigms. Because cloud native is so different from traditional architectures, both in how workloads are developed and how they need to be secured, there is a need to rethink our approach to security in these environments.