bhyolken

Yeah, metrics and logs, plus a few other things that depend on these (alerts, SLOs, metric-based dashboards, etc.).

Right now, there isn't much duplication of what we're sending to each vendor, so I don't think we'd save a ton by consolidating, at least based on list prices. We could maybe negotiate better prices based on higher volumes, but I'm not sure if Airplane is spending enough at this point to get massive discounts there.

Another potential benefit would definitely be reduced complexity and better integration for the engineering team. So, for instance, you could look at a log and then more easily navigate to the UI for the associated trace. Currently, we do this by putting Honeycomb URLs in our Datadog log events, which works but isn't quite as seamless. But, given that our team is pretty small at this point and that we're not spending a ton of our time on performance optimizations, we don't feel an urgent need to consolidate (yet).

Thanks! For logs, we actually use github.com/segmentio/events and just implemented a handler for that library that batches logs and periodically flushes them out to our collector using the underlying protocol buffer interface. We plan on migrating to log/slog soon, and once we do that we'll adapt our handler and can share the code.

Author here, thanks for the question! The current split developed from the personal preferences of the engineers who initially set up our observability systems, based on what they had used (and liked) at previous jobs.

We're definitely open to doing more consolidation in the future, especially if we can save money by doing that, but from a usability standpoint we've been pretty happy with Honeycomb for traces and Datadog for everything else so far. And, that seems to be aligned with what each vendor is best at at the moment.

I lived on that block for close to 10 years and can confirm that the safety situation around there significantly degraded over the last 1-2 years. Gangs of drug dealers moved in and took over key sidewalk areas (particularly 7th and 8th streets between Market and Mission), and violent crime and property destruction increased significantly. In my last year, there were two murders nearby (including one that I heard the gunshots for), and I witnessed a bunch of things I had never seen in the neighborhood before including trash fires, people screaming at all hours of the night, and overdose victims being revived on the sidewalk.

Although nothing bad happened to me personally, it just got really depressing and emotionally draining to live in a place where you're surrounded by so much suffering and destruction, and where you have to be hyper-vigilant every time you step outside. I packed up my things and left in December. My mental health and happiness have improved since then.

I don't blame Whole Foods and other businesses in the neighborhood for shutting down. The city leadership, including the mayor and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (SF's legislative body) really didn't seem to care one bit about the problems in that area of the city. Maybe if enough people and businesses vote with their feet, they'll be motivated to actually fix things.

Author here. Just a few clarifications:

1. I have a ton of respect for people who do robotics work. I was trying to be a little humorous/cheeky in my descriptions here. Apologies if it comes across as flippant, that was not what I intended.

2. My undergrad was in EECS, so I know a little about the hardware side of the world (although, to be fair, I've never done it for work).

3. There's a bit more to the story than what I wrote about in my post. For reasons around confidentiality, etc. I had to focus on the things that were safe to talk about openly, some of which I agree are kind of petty. Ditto for the reasons about leaving Stripe.

Author here, thanks for the comment. topicctl is really motivated by a desire to support rigorous, git-based topic management. The read-only views (tailing, repl, etc.) are secondary to that and are useful for our command-line-based workflows inside Segment, but are definitely not intended to replace all of the other good tooling out there, including the ones you've referenced.

Not yet! But would be happy to look into those and/or get help adding them.