Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btown | Hacker News Reader

The union of session replay and OpenTelemetry is fascinating - because what is a browser session, really, other than a sequence of RPCs between backend (micro)services <-> API server(s) <-> browser <-> human at the keyboard?

Being able to see that a user bounced because they couldn't handle the input that they were seeing - is it all that different from a service erroring because it cannot handle a certain type of input?

Honeycomb is great for the OpenTelemetry part on the server side (and with https://docs.honeycomb.io/getting-data-in/opentelemetry/brow... is moving towards full-stack), and systems like Posthog and Heap are great for sending session replay + browser events -> Clickhouse. But I don't think I've seen a great DX that ties everything together.

To that point - I would love to see different font/color options for HyperDX: the monospaced font can become tiring to read when so dense. Will be following this project closely though - this is amazing work so far!

Oh yeah browsers are really just another service (and that's what we try to treat it as, as well!) and it's really the same set of questions you'd ask of any service, but for some reason the tooling completely stops either at the frontend or at the backend.

As for monospace font - feedback received! Is there a particular section you think is too overwhelming? (search page, nav bar, etc.) We've been thinking of how can we balance between the ease of monospace for reading instead of having it literally the default on every UI surface :P

Perhaps it's more that when the search page primarily has non-error events (as in your demo), it's entirely a sea of white characters that all look the same, and trying to scan it for patterns with one's eyes can be fatiguing. Being able to color columns and values in different ways might help a lot - say, by the intensity of a numeric value like duration, or assigning distinct pastel colors to different services or prefixes like GET/POST.

You all are doing really cool things to discover patterns, link traces, etc. - I'd hate someone's takeaway from the demo page to be that the skill level required to make use of HyperDX is akin to needing to spot hair colors from looking at the same-colored code of the Matrix!

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