Have you heard the buzz about observability with Honeycomb 🐝? It’s the best tool on the market for observing your systems in real time to reduce toil and delight users. But don’t listen to us, listen to our buzzing community of “Pollinators”–this blog post is dedicated to them 💖 An invite is sent to our shared Slack workspace “Pollinators” to everyone who signs up for Honeycomb.

At ecobee, adopting Honeycomb started as a grassroots effort. Engineers signed up for the free tier and quickly started sharing insights with teammates. When it came time for ecobee to make the “build vs. buy” decision for observability tooling, sticking with Honeycomb was the clear choice. Now on the enterprise plan, ecobee’s engineering squads rely on features like SLOs to support the business’s need to map engineering effort to user impact.

Honeycomb’s event-based pricing model is pretty simple: we only care about how many events you send. For teams running workloads at scale, the question becomes: are all of my events worth keeping? How can you reduce overall event volume while maintaining fidelity? This HoneyByte is all about sampling strategies you can use to lower costs without sacrificing the value of your data.

We’ve released some improvements to our Java Beeline library! Allow me to share all the interesting new features.

Observability changes the way you understand and interact with your applications in production. Beyond knowing what’s happening in prod, observability is also a compass that helps you discover what’s happening on the way to production. Pierre Tessier joins us on Raw & Real to talk about how Honeycomb uses observability to improve the systems that support our production applications.

This is the story of how I used Honeycomb to troubleshoot redis/redis-rb#924 and discovered a surprising workaround.

Dark is a programming language and platform that enables building serverless backends. There’s no infra, framework or deployment nightmares. It’s a new paradigm in software delivery. As a startup, the Dark team is constantly making decisions about where to invest in improvements to support customer needs. With Honeycomb, they can observe user behavior and make business decisions based on meaningful data.

The most successful software development movement of my lifetime is probably test-driven development or TDD. With TDD, requirements are turned into very specific test cases, then the code is improved so the tests pass. You know it, you probably use it; and this practice has helped our entire industry level up at code quality. But it’s time to take a step beyond TDD in order to write better software that actually runs well in production. That step is observability driven development.

Practicing observability isn’t just about tools. It also means improving how you work together and how you share lessons across the team. Learning from each other helps everyone on your team become better engineers that can create amazing experiences with code, or that make code work at incredible scale (or both!). Writing software and operating it in production is—and must be—a team sport.

Pretty much every organization of any size is paying close attention to the adoption of security practices in order to manage and protect their most sensitive data, including personal identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI), or other customer and financial data. For any team using SaaS tools, data protection is a table-stakes requirement. For compliance regulated industries — banking, financial services, healthcare.