Modern application architectures are complex, typically consisting of hundreds of distributed microservices implemented in different languages and by different teams. As a developer, SRE, or DevOps engineer, you are responsible for the reliability and performance of these complex systems. But while you might have metrics that will help you debug when there’s an issue, metrics alone can’t help you narrow down and ultimately identify the root cause.

Sampling is the practice of extracting a subset of data from a dataset to make conclusions about that larger dataset. It’s far from a perfect solution, but when it’s implemented with Refinery, Honeycomb’s trace-aware sampling proxy, sampling can help you manage very high volumes of complex event data.

We are excited to announce that Elastic Observability has earned the Enterprise Management Associates Top 3 Award for Observability in 2021, a recognition of our commitment to empowering customers with products and features that advance digital transformation and solve real-life problems. This award is driven by EMA’s exhaustive, quantitative research into the top challenges and use cases facing developers, DevOps, SREs, IT professionals, and business professionals.

To celebrate our 13th birthday today, I sat down with Catchpoint's co-founders and my friends, Mehdi Daoudi, Chief Executive Officer, Drit Suljoti, Chief Product and Technology Officer, and J. Scotte Barkan, Chief Technology Officer (dialing in from Long Island after a long week of patch fixes), for an informal chat. We looked back to the days when they all met at DoubleClick prior to the three of them (along with Veronica Ellis, now a Principal Engineer at Eventbrite) founding Catchpoint.

Meeting the goal of delivering great performance and reliability in the face of our ever-changing, increasingly autonomous IT environments is fundamentally challenged by a data problem. Sure, there’s lots of it - logs, metrics, and APM traces - but it is exceedingly hard to extract actionable information when there are so many fast moving parts.