Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final installment of a series of blog posts previewing our State of Observability 2024 survey report. In last week’s episode of this blog series, we looked at whether observability is replacing or enhancing existing IT monitoring tools. This week, we’ll look at why metrics are the most important observability data type to ITOps teams and what's holding back tracing.

Eight weeks. When someone asks me about the synergies of Cisco + Splunk with regards to full-stack observability, I think about how much we’ve accomplished in just eight weeks. Eight weeks since the close of the acquisition, our teams have already come together to jointly develop, and will deliver, a new capability for enabling observability across the entire digital footprint for both Cisco and Splunk customers.

As a fan of OpenTelemetry, I love to see Cribl meeting customers where they are and helping them get to where they want to be with a vendor-agnostic approach. Where it is not possible or practical to re-instrument a telemetry source, whether an application or infrastructure, the barrier to adopting OpenTelemetry Signals can be daunting.

As our Field CTO Liz Fong-Jones says, production excellence is important for cloud-native software organizations because it ensures a safe, reliable, and sustainable system for an organization’s customers and employees. A CoPE helps organizations cultivate the practices and tools necessary to achieve that consistently. In part one of our CoPE series, we analogized the CoPE with safety departments.

Our storage engine, affectionately known as Retriever, has served us faithfully since the earliest days of Honeycomb. It’s a tool that writes data to disk and reads it back in a way that’s optimized for the time series-based queries our UI and API makes. Its architecture has remained mostly stable through some major shifts in the surrounding system it supports, notably including our 2021 implementation of a new data model for environments and services.

In software development, dynamic instrumentation is a powerful linchpin between the development and debugging workflows. With software complexity reaching unprecedented levels, it is also a key enabler in boosting developer productivity in the pursuit of building performant and error-free software. Let’s explore the concept of dynamic instrumentation and understand how it boosts software development processes with unparalleled insights into the source code.

Observability tools are crucial to the success of most IT infrastructures and services. This software allows users to quickly track key metrics across all services and applications. By peering into key network metrics, these tools give users detailed real-time data about a system.

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a series of blog posts previewing our State of Observability 2024 survey report. So far in this blog series, we’ve looked at where enterprises and MSPs are in their observability journeys and the benefits and challenges of their observability deployments. This week, we look at whether the observability story so far is more about replacing or enhancing existing IT management tools.