Observability in the Age of AI
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is making waves across various industries, promising to revolutionize how we handle data and automate complex tasks. Learn to navigate the technical hurdles, hype, and ethical concerns.
In May of 2023, we released the Honeycomb Query Assistant, an LLM-backed feature that lets engineers use natural language to generate and execute queries against their telemetry data. Instead of having to master a domain-specific query language, you can simply type in things like “slow endpoints by status code” and the Query Assistant will generate a relevant Honeycomb query for you to iterate on.
When we launched Query Assistant, six months after the splashy release of ChatGPT, it was the first of its kind to hit the market. It was also a bit of a test balloon for us as a company. We wanted to get a firsthand sense of what it was like to build tools using generative AI, then understand the challenges of maintaining these tools in the face of a user base with widely mixed familiarity with AI patterns. Who would end up actually using these tools, and how would they impact the business?
From May until November of 2023, we published a steady stream of material discussing our experiences building Query Assistant (which took just six weeks to write and ship, from start to finish!), and all the things we learned about instrumenting and understanding software with LLMs in the course of doing so:
