A few weeks ago, BubbleUp came out of Beta. We’ve been getting fantastic user feedback on how BubbleUp helps users speed through the Core Analysis Loop and lets people find things they never could have found before. We’ve also been learning more about how BubbleUp works with Tracing, which unearthed some difficult issues. Today, we’re taking those head on.
When I first joined this startup that makes an observability platform, I was a front-end Javascript developer who had never ssh’ed into production–I didn’t even know what tracing or monitoring or metrics were, let alone what it meant for logs to be structured or how they could be useful to me. But within a couple months I joined the on-call rotation, and now share responsibility in our services along with the rest of my team.
I’ve never been on-call, but I’ve been on-call adjacent for a lot of my adult life—my partners, my housemates, my friends…they’ve largely been sysadmins, in Operations, or Dev/Ops, which means I’ve experienced a lot of the pain second-hand.
At Honeycomb, we’re pretty engineering-focused. We think our product is something every developer can benefit from, and we’re working to build something we would want to (and do!) use every day to make our own jobs easier.
DevOps, Observability, Continuous Delivery, Test in Production, Chaos Engineering, and Software Ownership are all major themes in software development today, but why? In an ideal world, we get everything right the first time, nothing breaks, no one DDOS’ us, and the weather report is “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs.” Reality of course is different – and better, to be honest.
Behaviour Interactive (BHVR) is one of the largest independent video game developers in North America. They have developed over 250 titles and sold over 60 million copies on all major platforms.
The search-first problem-solving approach—meaning “open up the log search tool” (Splunk, ELK, Loggly, SumoLogic, Scalyr, etc)—is a costly and time-consuming operation during which the true source of a problem is rarely pinpointed in short order. Log search tools require work by the user to transform text strings into fields that are ready for statistical analysis.
If you are running a distributed system and have reached a point of scale where you’re running 5+ services, you are more than likely experiencing difficulties when troubleshooting. Does the following sound somewhat familiar?
In just a few days, we’ll all be embarking on the new year–kicking its tires and planning our conquests for the months to come. This holiday in-between week, while the days are just barely beginning to get a little longer, seems like a good time to look back on the events of the past year and remember some of the good times we’ve shared–so join me for a little retrospective fun.
At Honeycomb, we are frequently asked how we compare to what else is out there. Do these other tools offer observability? Do I need them all? What’s important? Metrics? Logs? What’s the best way to monitor application performance?
