Let’s imagine a scenario: you use OpenTelemetry, and your observability backend runs on several hosts. You collect data on application latency, and notice a recent increase that you want to investigate. But how will you know which host caused the degradation? This is exactly where OpenTelmetry resources come in. In the context of OpenTelemetry, a resource represents the entity producing the telemetry data, such as a container, host, process, service, or operating system.

Earlier this year, we introduced a new logging and performance monitoring tool, Honeybadger Insights. You can finally send your logs, application events, and telemetry data to Honeybadger! Once you do, you can query your logs and events to diagnose performance issues, perform root-cause analyses, and create beautiful charts and dashboards to see what's happening in real time.

While some monitoring tools excel at a specific task, observability works best when you have a holistic view of your system. You need a platform capable of working with all of your telemetry collectively, otherwise you can end up with a complex, inefficient, and expensive collection of incongruent, siloed tools. That’s what one team at Dell Technologies realized before they made a switch to Grafana Cloud last year.

In recent years, “the biggest needs we’ve heard from our customers have been to make it easier to understand their observability data, to extend observability into the application layer, and to get deeper, contextualized analytics,” said Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana Labs, at ObservabilityCON 2023.

In discussions across the tech and data communities in recent years, a provocative idea has been gaining traction: the notion that dashboards are dead. The first time I came across this was in the article by Taylor Brownlow of the same name, "Dashboards are Dead". A worthwhile read. The article suggests that dashboards, as we known them, no longer serve the needs of modern data-driven organizations. Not through their own fault as such, more through misuse or over-asking.