Honeycomb changelog honeycomb.io

New

A new version of Secure Tenancy is now available. This release includes:

Major performance improvements

• We've parallelized encryption which enables the proxy to handle many more events per second. (Load tests indicate over 10x more 🎉)
• You can configure this using the max_parallelism variable.
• We added new telemetry to assist with this tuning process.

Miscellaneous

• Support for regular expressions to specify Allowed Origins. Define these with allowed_origin_patterns.

If you are a Secure Tenancy customer, to access the new version of Secure Tenancy:

1. Log into Honeycomb
2. Go to Team Settings and click on the Secure Tenancy tab
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page - the new releases are listed there

Please contact support@honeycomb.io if you have any questions

New

The new LENGTH() function lets you calculate the length of strings directly in queries, using either "bytes" or "chars" for units.

Both will evaluate to the same thing for ascii strings, but very different values for multi-byte UTF-8 characters:

# Length of an ASCII string
LENGTH("hello", "bytes") # == 5
LENGTH("hello", "chars") # == 5

# .. and an emoji
LENGTH("🏳️‍🌈", "bytes") # == 14
LENGTH("🏳️‍🌈", "chars") # == 1

We added search to Honeycomb! Now you can easily find SLOs, Triggers, Datasets, Boards (public to a team), and more using this simple search page.

You can activate search by clicking the magnifying glass icon or with a key command (ctrl/cmd+k or /).

Clicking on an item will navigate to it in Honeycomb.

New

Improvement

We've made some changes to improve the experience of managing team membership. On the team settings page, team owners can now change other owners into members, and all users can sort the team members list by email or role.

New

A new version of Secure Tenancy is now available. This release includes:

PostgreSQL database support

• You can additionally use PostgreSQL as a database for your Secure Tenancy proxy. Check out our docs to learn about how to set this up for your team.

Support for OTLP over HTTP

• You can now send us trace data with any OpenTelemetry SDK without any need for a Honeycomb exporter component.

• For now, the OTLP/HTTP+JSON format for sending trace data is still experimental. We’ll ensure it’s directly supported by all Honeycomb endpoints once it matures.

• Read more about OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb here.

Enhanced configuration support for Kubernetes

• Every configuration value is now settable from the environment.

Miscellaneous

• The migrate4 migration tool now supports username + password parameters.
• You can now use any API key to initialize Secure Tenancy for a team.
• Bugfixes and performance improvements.

If you are a Secure Tenancy customer, to access the new version of Secure Tenancy:

1. Log into Honeycomb
2. Go to Team Settings and click on the Secure Tenancy tab
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page - the new releases are listed there

Please contact support@honeycomb.io if you have any questions

Improvement

You can now link to a specific span within the trace waterfall! We're happy to make it a little easier to share interesting spans, while keeping the context of the trace.

To link to a span, select it in the trace view and copy and paste that URL.

New

We've introduced three new operations -- RATE_MAX, RATE_AVG, and RATE_SUM -- to help you better visualize counter-style data in metric datasets.

Metric data often contains counters and sums, such as system.cpu.time.user, that are most meaningful when visualized as the rate at which the field is changing. Use Rate operators to clearly chart these metrics.

• RATE_MAX(<numeric_field_name>): Displays the difference between subsequent field values after applying the MAX operator

• RATE_AVG(<numeric_field_name>): Displays the difference between subsequent field values after applying the AVG operator

• RATE_SUM(<numeric_field_name>): Displays the difference between subsequent field values after applying the SUM operator

View our documentation to learn more about using Rate operators in Honeycomb, including how to choose the right query granularity for the best visualization results.

Rate operations are available to all plan types.

Improvement

We've given a little bit of extra love to the trace experience, to make it easier to navigate spans.

You can now:

• Use arrow keys to quickly navigate between spans in a trace.
• Use your keyboard to expand and collapse spans. (Select a span, then press Enter to open the menu of options.)

Type ? on the trace page to bring up keyboard hints.

Improvement

It's now easier to see the spans that contain errors in the trace waterfall! Errors that you define under Dataset Settings are highlighted in red by default in the trace view. To toggle off highlighting, navigate to the Settings menu at the top of the trace view.

New

The Query Data API is now generally available to Honeycomb Enterprise customers.

With this API, you can do things such as:

• Visualize your data on custom dashboards
• Analyze your data in an environment like Jupyter Notebooks to glean deep insights
• Use observability data to automate your continuous delivery systems

To learn about this, check out the announcement blog post.