Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Written by Andrew Puch and Brian Langbecker You use NGINX as a proxy for your application, and you want to leverage your favorite features in Honeycomb to help make sense of the traffic data. Have no fear: Honeycomb is more than capable and ready to help! Things you will need: Before you start with the instructions, let’s discuss a lightweight tool called Honeytail. This utility will tail log files, parse the various formats, and send the data to Honeycomb.

Today, we’re announcing major new updates to Honeycomb’s PagerDuty integration. These updates put more of the information you need into PagerDuty notifications and allow for greater configurability. These enhancements are available to all users who leverage Honeycomb Triggers and Burn Alerts to send notifications via PagerDuty.

It’s no secret that CI/CD pipelines make the lives of engineering and operations easier by accelerating the feedback loop for higher quality code and apps. They build code, run tests, and safely deploy new versions of your application. But just like any aspect of development, poor integration, invisible bottlenecks, and bugs can plague your pipelines. And debugging them? Well, it’s complicated.

It’s already September! Time flies by when you’re getting things done, and we’ve been a busy bunch of bees here at Honeycomb. 🐝 We’re excited that we’ve gotten to share some of those changes with you already, like our relaunched interactive sandbox and the beta release of our OpenTelemetry log support and Go distribution, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We recently hosted a Twitter Space, and a question came in regarding speaking to executives about instrumenting for observability. It’s a great topic we love expanding on. Here’s the answer we provided.

We’ve got a lot of OpenTelemetry-flavored honey to send your way, ranging from OpenTelemetry SDK distribution updates to protocol support. We now support OpenTelemetry logs, released a new SDK distribution for OpenTelemetry Go, and have some updates around OpenTelemetry + Honeycomb to share. Let’s see what all the buzz is about this time! 🐝🐝

Someone once described dashboards to me as “expensive TV for software engineers.” At first, I stood there quietly shocked—dashboards had informed many root cause analyses (RCAs) in my life as a developer.

SLOs—or Service Level Objectives—can be pretty powerful. They provide a safety net that helps teams identify and fix issues before they reach unacceptable levels and degrade the user experience. But SLOs can also be intimidating. Here’s how a lot of teams feel about them: We know we want SLOs, we’re not sure how to really use them, and we don’t know how to debug SLO-based alerts. Don’t worry, we’ve got your answer—observability!

In this post, we’ll look at how you can use OpenTelemetry to monitor your unit tests and send that data to Honeycomb to visualize. It’s important to note that you don’t need to adopt Honeycomb, or even OpenTelemetry, in your production application to get the benefit of tracing. This example uses OpenTelemetry purely in the test project and provides great insights into our customer’s code. We’re going to use xUnit as the runner and framework for our tests.

The scenario: you want to see distributed traces, maybe for your web app. You’ve set up an OpenTelemetry collector to receive OTLP traces in JSON over HTTP, and send those to Honeycomb (how to do that is another post, and we’ll link it here when it’s up).