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Observability is for User Happiness

Emily Nakashima, Director, Engineering Honeycomb.io

Within the observability community, there’s a saying, “nines don’t matter if users aren’t happy,” meaning that 99.999% server uptime is a pointless goal if our customers aren’t having a fast, smooth, productive experience. But how do we know if users are happy? As members of the web performance community, we’ve been thinking about the best ways to answer that question for years.

Now the observability community is asking the same questions, but coming at them from the opposite side of the stack. What can we learn from each other? Emily will talk about how approaching web performance through the lens of observability has changed the way her team thinks about performance instrumentation and optimization. She’ll cover the nuts & bolts of how Honeycomb instrumented its customer-facing web app, and she’ll show how the Honeycomb team is using this data to find and fix some of its trickiest performance issues, optimize customer productivity, and drive the design of new features.

About Emily Nakashima

Emily manages the engineering & design teams at Honeycomb.io. In the past, she’s worked on javascript, web perf optimization and client-side monitoring & telemetry at other developer tools companies like Bugsnag & GitHub. In her free time, she organizes an unconference called AndConf, makes many checklists, and likes to talk about disaster preparedness.