March 2019 Summaries

Charity Majors' talk at QCon San Francisco focuses on the concept of testing in production, highlighting the importance of tools and principles like canarying software to build confidence in new deployments. She emphasizes the crucial role of instrumentation and observability in understanding and managing complex systems, suggesting that these elements are the missing links that make effective testing in production possible. Her presentation is titled "Yes, I Test in Production (And So Do You)" and is available for viewing on InfoQ.

In an article sponsored by Semaphore, Wojtek Cichoń discusses his interview with Honeycomb’s Charity Majors, focusing on the importance of developers being on call, the concept of observability-driven development, and the role of software ownership within development and operations teams.

BubbleUp, having recently emerged from its Beta phase, is receiving positive feedback for its ability to streamline the Core Analysis Loop and reveal previously undiscoverable insights. Integrated with Honeycomb's tracing capabilities, BubbleUp effectively analyzes the distribution of data dimensions to identify unusual data points. Despite the challenge of managing unlimited dimensionality, Honeycomb addresses this by treating data as polymorphic, acknowledging that different event types have distinct shapes and characteristics. Recent improvements in BubbleUp prioritize displaying dimensions that are most relevant to the user's selection, enhancing the user experience by highlighting significant discrepancies between selected data and the baseline. This prioritization helps users quickly identify patterns and anomalies, particularly in tracing data, making it more efficient to ascertain the underlying causes of unusual events. Honeycomb encourages users to provide feedback and engage with the community to further refine and explore BubbleUp's capabilities.