Today, every company is a software company and digital business is a core strategy for many organizations. To gain the much-needed agility and efficient scalability, companies in all verticals are modernizing their infrastructure by moving to hybrid, multicloud and cloud-native environments. Realizing that modern applications run on modern infrastructure, IT leaders are prioritizing infrastructure modernization initiatives.

Observability is made up of metrics, logs, and traces. These pillars help us understand the behavior of applications under normal execution, which further accelerates identifying anomalies in case of application failure or deviation from normal execution. Logging is not about tracing each and every operation, it is about sensible, consistent, and machine-readable log messages that expose the application behavior.

We often say that Honeycomb helps you find a needle in your haystack. But how exactly is that done? This post walks you through when and how to visualize your data with heatmaps, creating a log scale to surface data you might otherwise miss, and using BubbleUp to quickly discover the patterns behind why certain data points are different.