A small program to send events to Honeycomb with a random delay over the past 5 minutes, used to illustrate the problem of undestanding when data is delayed in arrival vs. when the service is actually suffering a drop in throughput.

main.go

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"math/rand"
	"os"
	"sync"
	"time"

	libhoney "github.com/honeycombio/libhoney-go"
)

func main() {

	rand.Seed(time.Now().UTC().UnixNano())

	wk := os.Getenv("HONEYCOMB_APIKEY")
	if wk == "" {
		fmt.Println("please configure a writekey with the environment variable $HONEYCOMB_APIKEY")
	}

	conf := libhoney.Config{
		APIKey:  wk,
		Dataset: "delayedevents",
	}
	libhoney.Init(conf)

	wg := sync.WaitGroup{}
	for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
		wg.Add(1)
		go func() {
			for {
				fmt.Printf(".")
				sendEvent()
			}
		}()
	}
	// we never stop the wait groups so this will never finish.
	// aka pause here until we're killed
	wg.Wait()
}

func sendEvent() {
	ev := libhoney.NewEvent()
	// shove the event back somewhere in to the last 5 minutes with 40sec of missing data at the leading edge
	ev.Timestamp = time.Now().Add(-1 * (time.Duration(rand.Intn(300)) * time.Second) - 40*time.Second)
	ev.AddField("foo", 3)
	ev.Send()
	time.Sleep((time.Duration(rand.Intn(200)) * time.Millisecond))
}