Stepping through a trace is an invaluable debugging workflow, providing a way to follow requests from service to service even as the applications we manage become more complex and distributed. That same complexity can make getting started with distributed tracing feel overwhelming, but it’s important to remember that instrumenting your code is an additive process—you don’t need to boil the ocean. A trace through a thousand services starts with a single ID.

Chris Bertinato, Software Architect at NS1, and Nate Daly, Head of Architecture at NS1 along with Jessica Kerr, Honeycomb Developer Advocate, and Account Executive Scott Phillips discuss how NS1 used distributed tracing to scale their organization and accelerate their migration from a monolith to microservices.

Welcome to The Authors’ Cut Series

Istio service meshes enable organizations to secure, connect, and monitor microservices to modernize their enterprise apps more swiftly and securely. With the addition of distributed tracing and powerful observability tooling, platform operators can gain immediate actionable insights about their applications.

Many teams are wasting far too much time and energy searching through massive amounts of log data trying to find answers to user latency issues. Metrics data doesn’t help either as it only tells you that there is a problem, not where to fix it. This is why Coveo turned to observability. Through implementing observability with Honeycomb, Coveo was able to reduce their user latency by 50 percent.

Solutions Engineers Vanessa Huerta Granda and Emily Ruppe from Jeli, along with Honeycomb’s Field CTO Liz Fong-Jones and SRE Fred Hebert discuss some of our more interesting recent incidents and how we use Honeycomb and Jeli together for incident response.

Blake Irvin and Matouš Dzivjak from SumUp’s Software Engineering team, Honeycomb Solution Architect Michael Sickles and Account Executive Nathan Leary, discuss how SumUp incorporated observability, specifically, SLOs, to identify and resolve issues before they grew into customer-noticeable problems.

Let Honeycomb map out your distributed services

Debugging with logs in distributed systems can be a pain. It’s tough to search raw data looking for a pattern, relating potential causes with other logs, and checking trace and metrics data for more confirmation. Is finding one pattern enough? What if there are other problems? Who knows how many colliding factors are relevant? At Honeycomb, we’re flipping the script on the log search problem. Hear our resident experts, (former Splunk Ninja) Michael Wilde and Andy Dufour, discuss how Honeycomb customers have technically evolved their log analysis process to achieve fast pattern detection, skipping the search grep/search loop entirely.

In this video, you will learn how to quickly get up and running with OpenTelemetry using Helm—plus how to start ingesting data and viewing the results in Honeycomb.