In the complicated world of debugging modern software, metric and log-based tools only go so far. A small team of 25 engineers is hard at work inside a three-year-old startup company to improve viewable insight for event-driven problems in network systems.

“We are an observability platform to help people find the unknown unknowns,” said Christine Yen (pictured), co-founder of Honeycomb.io. “Instead of waiting 20 minutes for a query over a huge volume of data, you wait 20 seconds. We’re for the folks who need answers now.”

Yen spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Lauren Cooney (@lcooney), founder and chief executive officer of Spark Labs Consulting LLC, at the DevNet Create event in Mountain View, California. They discussed how Yen’s prior experience led her to found Honeycomb and the company’s solution for tracking failures. (* Disclosure below.)

Solving the visibility gap

Before founding Honeycomb, Yen worked at Parse, a mobile backend as-a-service platform. Acquired by Facebook in 2013, the Parse platform was shut down by the social media giant last year. The experience gave Yen insight into the visibility gap that existed when mobile applications suddenly stopped working and calls flooded a service center, especially when a key customer was experiencing the failure of multiple requests per second.

“We’d look at our dashboard and say, ‘No, it’s not down; it must be you; it must be network issues,’” Yen recalled. “It’s not a good answer, especially if that customer was Disney. You can’t tease that out of your graphs.”

Honeycomb relies on a sampling scheme that essentially maps to events of highest interest flowing through a network. Events that time out, for example, are likely to be more interesting than permissioning errors, according to Yen.

“The focus on the product is making this mindset of observability accessible to software engineers,” Yen said. “We believe very strongly that the era of a single person in a room keeping everything up is outdated.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s more coverage of the DevNet Create 2018 event from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for DevNet Create. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE