After we’d fixed Aparna’s network issue, James came to see me at my desk. Masks on, socially distanced and all that, but it was nice to have some face-to-face time. James is cool – that dry British humor and not your classic IT Ops dude. He’s been here forever and mentored me when the CIO, Charlie, hired me as the first SRE here a year or so ago. I lucked out really.

Monitoring has always been a crucial operation in a software development cycle. This is mainly because of the complexity of industry-level IT and consumer-facing product development. Additionally, there is an ever-growing demand for rapid upgrades in products. To meet these requirements, streamlined performance and stability have become more important than ever; and without effective monitoring practices, they appear difficult to achieve.

Metrics measuring user engagement on your website are crucial for observability in marketing. Metrics will help marketing departments understand which of your web pages do not provide value for your business. Once known, developers can look at the web page’s technical metrics and determine if updates are required. Typically user engagement statistics, like the average time required to load your page, are stored separately from technical site logs.

Recently, we added a new derived column function to Honeycomb, INGEST_TIMESTAMP(), which can help customers debug event latency and/or inaccurate timestamps. A meaningful minority of the events sent to Honeycomb are already old when they arrive, and a very special few claim to have been sent from the future. Has this happened to you? Let’s do an experiment.

We are thrilled that Elastic has been recognized as a Leader and a Fast Mover in the 2021 GigaOm Radar Report for Cloud Observability. GigaOm Radar reports offer a forward-looking view of the market and are designed to help IT decision makers evaluate solutions with an eye to the future. Their analysts consider not just where the solutions are today, but also how the market is evolving and where the solutions are headed relative to that trend.

Last week, we announced that Refinery, our platform-agnostic sampling solution, is generally available. But it’s always better to see it for yourself. Follow the steps in this HoneyByte to see how Refinery works by running it locally.

Before we start, please take a moment to appreciate what day it is. IoT, or Internet of Things, has been a buzzword for longer than usual. Buzzwords usually have two common properties, and then their paths fork. I like thinking about buzzwords and about the useful aspects of what they mean. The most recent public example focuses on another buzzword currently in its hype phase: observability.