Discussion on: For the Love of Bleep! Building a Scalable Monitoring System

[rhymes]

Hi Molly, nice article! Consolidating monitoring tools is definitely a plus and for the on call people probably even something to preserve their sanity :D

On the note of consolidation and observability of a distributed system, have you had the chance to take a look at Honeycomb? I'd love to read your take on it.

[Molly Struve (she/her)]

I just looked at Honeycomb for the first time and it looks pretty nice! Couple things I consider when choosing a monitoring solution

• Does it integrate with all the third party services you need it to integrate with?
• Does it integrate well into your application?
  • For example, New Relic was a pain for us to integrate with our Rails application. We had a lot of monkey patches in place just to get it to work and we had code included all over the place in our app. Datadog, on the other hand, integrated seamlessly. We included the gem, set up a single configuration file, deployed the app, and that was it. There was a large net code deletion when we switched.

[rhymes]

Thanks for the reply!

NewRelic has a weird pricing models as well.

About HoneyComb, you should follow its CEO regardless, she's a very interesting voice in the observability/monitoring landscape: twitter.com/mipsytipsy

I think its Ruby client library is a still raw (they are a Go shop IIRC) but the idea behind it is super solid.

[Molly Struve (she/her)]

Oh yeah, I do follow her!!! She seems pretty awesome 😃