The Tarot of Future Telemetry, Help Your Future Self

Honeycomb can help you find the needles in your haystack. But it helps when you make the needles more findable! Beyond automatic instrumentation, adding custom telemetry to your events means thinking about how that data will be used when you and your team don’t even know what it is they’re looking for. How can you make the telemetry you’re adding today useful in an unpredictable future? In this episode, we chat about how Honeycomb approaches considerations when adding instrumentation as we develop new code. Our Principal Developer Advocate and contributing software engineer covers how telemetry for Honeycomb’s SLO feature was developed in preparation for its release to production. We’ll show real examples of the telemetry we use in production, look at how different bits of telemetry code are represented in the Honeycomb UI, and talk about what considerations you can use to decide which bits of context to capture in our events. Thanks, past self!