Honeycomb Build Events & The 4 Key Metrics
Introduction
Ever wondered how your builds are doing? Circle CI is a wonderful tool, but it won’t tell you where you’re being inefficient.
There are 4 key metrics (also known as DORA metrics or Accelerate metrics). They’re the industry standard for healthy teams.
- Deployment Frequency
- Mean Lead Time
- Change Failure Rate
- Mean Time To Recover
Honeycomb build events, used correctly, can give you vision on both deployment frequency and the “deploying to production” part of mean lead time.
With this data, you can start making choices about how you work, how to optimise pipelines and how to be a fast driver.
What is Honeycomb?
Honeycomb is an observability platform that is growing in popularity and has just secured a round of funding worth $20million.
It’s inexpensive, easy to get started with and is focused on helping you find answers about your services running in production.
Read more here
What is Honeycomb Build Events?
Honeycomb publish a circleci orb (reusable bits of circleci functionality) and instructions to set it up can be found here
Honeycomb buildevents telemetry
This orb provides you with simple commands to add opentelemetry tracing to your circleci workflows. Below, you can see some examples where we’ve added it to two of our projects to see what kind of information we could gather and if it was valuable.
The first project was a simpler workflow. It only deploys into a single environment and the individual steps are less complex.
The second project was much more complicated. It deploys into 7 different environments and has multiple steps per environment with multiple commands per step.
We can also aggregate across these projects to see top-level analytics. We’ve created an example board in honeycomb, pictured just below.
How to get started?
Well, it’s free so head on down to Al’s Toy Barn and set up your honeycomb build events integration.
This work took us about thirty minutes per service so it’s not a huge time investment for a potentially huge payoff.
Learnings and future work?
- We’re currently only collecting the data. As a company, we still have a lot to learn in terms of analysing and utilising the data. However this will give us a large set of data for when we start looking at these 4 key metrics in detail.
- There’s some refinement to be done in our honeycomb build events recommendations to ensure that we have unified markers on builds to allow us to assess the whole of product engineering with simple queries
