HoneyByte: Test Out Refinery Yourself!
Blog post from Honeycomb
Refinery, a platform-agnostic sampling solution from Honeycomb, is now generally available, allowing users to effectively sample telemetry data to manage costs without needing to sample data to use Honeycomb itself. By running Refinery locally with Docker, users can configure their applications to send data through Refinery before reaching Honeycomb, enabling the validation of sampling approaches with dry runs and the measurement of sampling impact with Honeycomb's Usage Center. Various sampling methods, such as deterministic, rules-based, and exponential moving average (EMA) sampling, are discussed, each offering unique benefits for managing different traffic patterns and ensuring efficient data handling. Users can experiment with Refinery's sampling strategies to maintain control over telemetry data while ensuring statistical accuracy in reconstructing traffic shapes. Honeycomb's Enterprise tier includes Refinery support, and a free 30-day trial is available for users interested in applying these techniques to their production workloads.