Not long ago, we announced the launch of Honeycomb’s Service Map, a new feature that gives users the ability to get an overall, filterable view of their system and how everything is connected, along with some exciting new enhancements to BubbleUp. What’s the story behind these changes? They make it even easier for developers to zero-in on issues, even when they are hidden in billions of lines of code.

If you were asked to evaluate how good crews were at fighting forest fires, what metric would you use? Would you consider it a regression on your firefighters’ part if you had more fires this year than the last? Would the size and impact of a forest fire be a measure of their success? Would you look for the cause—such as a person lighting it, an environmental factor, etc—and act on it? Chances are that yes, that’s what you’d do.

Whether you’ve been following along with our Authors’ Cut series or doing some self-paced learning, our O’Reilly book Observability Engineering is one of the best resources for jumpstarting your observability journey. It serves as a blueprint to help you understand and map out the technical and cultural requirements of implementing observability into your organization.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we think distributed tracing gets a very bad rap for being too complicated and labor-intensive. We’re here to show you three ways you can jumpstart a distributed tracing effort, starting small and expanding as it makes sense. These examples involve only a little code and perhaps a bit of a mindset change. Starting small with distributed tracing can even be fun, because who doesn’t like getting customized results without much work?

Brick by brick, block by block—if you’ve been with us throughout our Author’s Cut blog series (and if you haven’t, you can go catch up), you’ve seen us build the case for observability from the ground up. We’ve covered structured events, the core analysis loop, and use cases for managing applications in production—and that’s just to start.

We here at Honeycomb really like OpenTelemetry and goodie bags, so we have a nice little OpenTelemetry-flavored holiday goodie bag to share with you before you’re off for the holidays!

The line from observability to customer joy is straighter than you think. We recently learned this from NS1, a managed DNS provider and Honeycomb customer, in a panel discussion with Nate Daly, Head of Architecture at NS1 and Chris Bertinato, Software Architect at NS1.

Bugs can remain dormant in a system for a long time, until they suddenly manifest themselves in weird and unexpected ways. The deeper in the stack they are, the more surprising they tend to be. One such bug reared its head within our columnar datastore in May this year, but had been present for more than two years before detection.

Today, we’re announcing the expansion of Honeycomb integrations with various AWS services. This update now covers a much wider swath of AWS services, makes it easier to integrate your AWS stack with Honeycomb, and with our new BubbleUp enhancements, you’ll be identifying and debugging hidden issues in your AWS stack faster than ever.

I joined Honeycomb as a Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) midway through September, and it’s been a wild ride so far. One thing I was especially excited about was the opportunity to see Honeycomb’s incident retrospective process from the inside. I wasn’t disappointed! The first retrospective I took part in was for our ingestion delays incident on September 8th.