2 posts tagged with "observability"

Choosing an observability platform means committing to how you'll debug production issues for years to come. Migration is costly, so the initial decision matters.

This comparison evaluates New Relic, Honeycomb, and Dash0 across installation complexity, feature sets, documentation quality, and pricing models. Each platform takes a different architectural approach: New Relic offers 700+ integrations and enterprise features, Honeycomb focuses on event-based debugging with high-cardinality data, and Dash0 builds natively on OpenTelemetry for Kubernetes environments.

You'll see how each platform handles Kubernetes setup, what daily usage actually feels like, and what you pay at different scales.

So here's what happened. You spent a weekend building a shared grocery list app: Flask backend, a bit of Alpine.js for the frontend, PostgreSQL because you know it. You posted it on Twitter with a casual "made a thing" and went to bed.

You wake up to 50,000 people trying to use it at once.

Your $5/month VPS is melting. The app is down. People are commenting "bro your server is cooked" and you're frantically googling "how to scale a flask app." Someone replies with "just throw it in Kubernetes lol" and honestly, at this point, why not?

So you hack together a basic Kubernetes setup. Copy some YAML from Stack Overflow, adjust the indentation until kubectl apply works, and somehow you've got pods running. You set up a HorizontalPodAutoscaler because a blog post said you should. The app is back online. Crisis averted.

But now you have a new problem: you have no idea what's happening inside your cluster.

Are the pods actually scaling? Is the database the bottleneck? Why did that pod restart three times? Your mental model is "Kubernetes is a magic box where containers go to live," and that was fine until it wasn't.

You need monitoring. So you start googling.

We'll explore three popular monitoring platforms: SigNoz, DataDog, and Grafana.