Honeycomb
Honeycomb is an observability company born out of Facebook and founded by engineers Christine Yen and Charity Majors. Yen and Majors met while working at Parse, a backend start-up that was later acquired by Facebook. Majors was the first infrastructure engineer at Parse, and Yen was a software engineer.
Honeycomb is a tool that helps developers understand software systems. It's designed to help engineering teams get full observability of their systems, better predict potential issues, and debug code.
The company claims to "transcend the three pillars approach to observability" in preference for one single source of truth. Honeycomb's trace/log events stitch together events to illuminate what happened within the flow of system interactions. Key benefits include real-time querying on production code, fast debugging and anomaly detection, and full compatibility with OpenTelemetry.
groundcover
groundcover is a cutting-edge observability platform that is reinventing the domain with an inCloud architecture and eBPF technology. For anyone unfamiliar with eBPF, it is a revolutionary technology that works at the Linux kernel, and because it operates at the kernel level, teams can implement observability, security, and networking functionality with the ability to oversee and control the entire system.
Today, groundcover utilizes eBPF extensively to provide high-performance networking both on-prem and in cloud-native environments, to extract fine-grained observability data at low overhead, and to help application developers trace applications and provide insights for performance troubleshooting.
That last benefit is especially relevant as groundcover has just announced a deep integration with the popular open-source project OpenTelemetry. By supporting OpenTelemetry, groundcover is embracing a more democratic approach to observability data that helps companies avoid vendor lock-in and collect data in a standardized way. Unlike other observability vendors that require users to install and maintain a proprietary agent, groundcover works with OpenTelemetry out of the box, providing users with a single, seamless experience.
With this integration, an engineer can trace which services have spoken to one another with distributed tracing and then leverage the power of eBPF to unlock new intelligence, such as the user ID associated with the request, what device they used, and any associated error messages. In the past, this flow would require two sets of tools and dashboards, which have now been consolidated within groundcover's UI.
Axiom
For anyone looking for a disruptive player in the observability and logging space, Axiom needs to be on your radar as an event data platform of interest. Not only does the company enable enterprises to store all of their data, forever, for cheap—it can also be queried in real time and pipelined to 3rd party services. The company was listed as a Forbes Rising Star, and we expect to see some major announcements from this company related to AI in the coming year.
The companies that will win in the AI age will leverage as much data and context as possible. Data is the lifeblood of reliable AI—and that's where Axiom comes in. Axiom reinvents log management by helping engineering teams avoid data gymnastics like sampling with their ultra-efficient block format on object storage, empowering businesses to keep all of their data and query it on demand.
On top of that, Axiom intelligently unifies logs and distributed traces in the same database, providing unprecedented visibility and control. Built-in data routing capabilities ensure freedom from vendor lock-in, and their thoughtful approach to ingest storage and query leverages the best of cloud technology to deliver unmatched performance and cost-effectiveness.
