Honeycomb changelog honeycomb.io

New

You can now create Triggers that alert on every evaluation where events meet or exceed the threshold. These Triggers will no longer send a "resolved" message.

This may be useful when:

• You want to receive alerts when Triggers continue to meet or exceed the threshold.
• The triggered event is more important than receiving a resolved event.

Check "Send an alert every time threshold is met" in Trigger settings to select this alerting type.

New

Effective today, all Honeycomb Pro customers have access to two new capabilities, previously exclusive to Honeycomb Enterprise: Metrics and Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

Honeycomb Metrics

Honeycomb Metrics brings essential system metrics alongside application observability data to provide a comprehensive view of your application and all of its underlying dependencies for faster debugging and incident resolution.

Send your metrics data to Honeycomb via OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, or AWS Cloudwatch, and query it just like any other dataset. Metrics are well suited to giving a picture of the general health of a host or resource. Honeycomb can consume and display metrics in addition to tracing and telemetry data.

Service Level Objectives (Limit 2)

Honeycomb SLOs make it possible to trigger alerts on issues that matter most to the business and quickly debug them. They also help you answer important questions like, “How much monthly downtime is tolerable? What performance impact is acceptable before users are negatively impacted? Should we focus on new features or tech debt?”

Define, measure, validate, and adjust engineering priorities collaboratively across your org with SLOs. SLO error budgets give teams the leeway they need to prioritize or de-prioritize production issues.

Upcoming Pricing Change

Effective Tuesday, April 26th, the price of Honeycomb Pro plans will be increasing. However, this change will not go into effect for existing Pro customers for an additional year, until April 2023, including new Pro accounts created before April 26th. We will be reaching out to customers directly with further details.

New

Starting today, if you create a new team in Honeycomb, you’ll have a new way to organize and query data in Honeycomb with constructs for Environments and Services. Worry less about how to structure and segment your data, and easily query across entire environments or within a specific service.

When can I migrate my current team? What is Honeycomb Classic?

Existing teams in Honeycomb are now part of the Honeycomb Classic experience that utilizes the datasets-only structure. A migration process to move Classic datasets into Environments is under development. Existing teams can create a new team to try out the new features. Read more about Honeycomb Classic in our docs.

New features optimized for the new Honeycomb

• Environments represent instances of your distributed systems or groups of related datasets in Honeycomb. Create any number of environments in Honeycomb and navigate across these instances using the new Environment selector in the navigation menu. Read more about Environments in our Best Practices Guide.
• API Keys are scoped to a specific environment.
• Service Datasets organize distributed traces. If you are using OpenTelemetry or our Beelines, Service Datasets will automatically be created for each configured service. Read more about how Honeycomb defines services here.
• Query across multiple datasets in Query Builder. Query Builder now includes a way to run a query across an entire environment via the All datasets in <environment_name> or a specific dataset with the Dataset Switcher.
• Charts in the Home Page have been updated to provide better glimpses into your Service Datasets. Read more about these updates in docs.
• Markers can now define a moment in time across an entire environment or specific datasets. Both types are markers can be viewed in dataset or environment queries with the Filter Markers feature.

How can I tell what team type I have?

You can check your team type by going to left sidenav and selecting Account -> My Account -> Your Teams. This will list all teams associated to your account and the team type.

Improvement

Honeycomb's Columns API now includes the last_written time for each column. This allows API users to determine when any column most recently received data. Happy querying!

Fix

When viewing your SLO, derived columns for the heatmap distribution graph now work as expected. Clicking through the heatmap graph or adding a filter using the Bubble Up menus no longer generate errors.

Improvement

We’ve streamlined Honeycomb’s navigation to give you more space! Recent Activity and Recent Boards now appear in their own pane. You can still expand and collapse the nav bar using the n keyboard command.

Improvement

Going forward, Honeycomb will truncate timestamps for OTLP metric datapoints to the second at ingestion. This will result in combining more metric datapoints into the same Honeycomb event.

When we process OTLP metrics, we combine metric datapoints into the same Honeycomb event if:

• they were received as part of the same OTLP request
• they have the same timestamp representing moment of capture
• they have the same set of resource attribute keys and values
• they have the same set of datapoint attribute keys and values

Previously, two metric datapoints a millisecond apart wouldn't have been combined. However, that level of granularity is not often useful, and resulted in more Honeycomb events than were necessary.

For more information on managing metrics event volume, please see https://docs.honeycomb.io/manage-data-volume/metrics/.

New

It's now possible to create triggers that use RATE_MAX, RATE_AVG, and RATE_SUM aggregations. On the triggers page, add a RATE clause in the "visualize" field to configure an alert when the rate of change for a given column falls above or below a threshold.

Check out our docs for more details on how RATE triggers work.

New

A new version of Secure Tenancy is now available. Please update to this version if you are on 1.12.0. 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