Honeycomb

San Francisco, CA, USA
2016
  |  By Austin Parker
You're probably familiar with the concept of real user monitoring (RUM) and how it's used to monitor websites or mobile applications. If not, here's the short version: RUM requires telemetry data, which is generated by an SDK that you import into your web or mobile application. These SDKs then hook into the JS runtime, the browser itself, or various system APIs in order to measure performance.
  |  By Rox Williams
Relying on their traditional observability 1.0 tool, Pax8 faced hurdles in fostering a culture of ownership and curiosity due to user-based pricing limitations and an impending steep price increase. Pax8’s platform engineering team was keen on modernizing the company’s cloud commerce platform, but they were hitting obstacles with their traditional observability 1.0 tool, which relied on the three pillars of logs, metrics, and traces.
  |  By Einar Norðfjörð
This article touches on how we at Birdie handled our transition from logs towards using OpenTelemetry as the primary mechanism for achieving world-class observability of our systems.
  |  By Jessica Kerr
Today at Google Next, Charity Majors demonstrated how to use Honeycomb to find unexpected problems in our generative AI integration. Software components that integrate with AI products like Google’s Gemini are powerful in their ability to surprise us. Nondeterministic behavior means there is no such thing as “fully tested.” Never has there been more of a need for testing in production!
  |  By Howard Yoo
A few days ago, I was in a meeting with a prospect who was just starting to try out OpenTelemetry. One of the things that they did was to create an observability demo project which contained an HTTP reverse proxy, a web frontend, three microservices, a database, and a message queue. Here’s a rough diagram: Their motivation was to try out OpenTelemetry and see how much effort it took for them to instrument their system.
  |  By Purvi Kanal
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are Google's preferred metrics for measuring the quality of the user experience for browser web apps. Currently, Core Web Vitals measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. These are the main indicators of what a user’s experience will be while using a web page: Note: As of March 12th, INP has become a stable Core Web Vital, replacing First Input Delay (FID).
  |  By Winston Hearn
There’s a sentence that strikes fear into the heart of every frontend developer I've ever met: Users are reporting issues, and we don't know how to replicate them. What do you do when that happens? Do you cry? Do you mark the issue as wontfix and move on? Personally, I took the road less traveled: gave up frontend engineering and moved into product management (this is not actually accurate but it's a good joke and it feels truthy).
  |  By Rox Williams
As a new company poised to transform the financial services industry with its modern money movement platform, Moov wanted an equally modern observability platform as part of the company’s operational tech stack. With Moov's platform hosted in Google Cloud, it uses a diverse range of technologies to allow clients to accept, store, send, and spend money. The integration of numerous software providers further amplifies the complexity of each transaction.
  |  By Martin Thwaites
For years, we’ve been installing what vendors have referred to as “agents” that reach into our applications and pull out useful telemetry information from them. From monitoring agents, to full-blown APM tools, this has been the standard for many decades. With OpenTelemetry though, the term “agent” isn’t used as much, and in most scenarios means something slightly different.
  |  By Kate Guarente-Smith
We're excited to unveil a new collaboration with Focused Labs, a leap forward in our shared commitment to advancing modern observability practices and enhancing the robustness of legacy systems. This partnership is not just about scaling our service offerings but also about integrating Focused Labs' deep engineering expertise with our observability platform to deliver unparalleled customer experiences.
  |  By Honeycomb
In this three minute clip from our recent webinar with DORA's Nathen Harvey, Charity Majors explains observability 1.0 versus observability 2.0.
  |  By Honeycomb
If you wrote a query but realized you were in the wrong environment, here's how you can avoid having to rewrite your query by copying the JSON. Thanks Jessitron for making this helpful video!
  |  By Honeycomb
Imagine a universe in which a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) sets Guinness World Records for the size of its online space battles—and that game is built on 20-year-old code. Well, imagine no more. Welcome to the world of EVE Online, where hundreds of thousands of players interact across 7,800+ star systems and participate in more than one million daily market transactions. As you might guess, updating and maintaining this codebase without interrupting game play could pose quite a challenge.
  |  By Honeycomb
Honeycomb Customer Success Manager Josh Levin explains how to troubleshoot production incidents using Honeycomb's telemetry data: metrics, traces, and logs. While these data forms have separate interfaces, you can investigate seamlessly within Honeycomb. Josh highlights the key role of the "retriever" service in data ingestion and querying and demonstrates cross-validating tracing data with metrics to spot anomalies in pod deployments and resource usage, presented in a separate dataset. He also uses effective log filtering and searching for keywords like "update status.".
  |  By Honeycomb
Buildevents is a small binary used to help instrument builds to generate trace telemetry. It populates the trace with metadata from the GitHub Actions environment so you have details about what occurred throughout the entire build. In this tutorial, learn how to instrument with Buildevents and GitHub actions.
  |  By Honeycomb
Buildevents is a small binary used to help instrument builds to generate trace telemetry. It populates the trace with metadata from the GitHub Actions environment so you have details about what occurred throughout the entire build. In this tutorial, learn how to instrument with Buildevents and GitHub actions.
  |  By Honeycomb
Nathan Lincoln, an SRE at Honeycomb, walks through the basics of feature flag best practices (using LaunchDarkly) to help you maintain a stable system. Feature flags are useful for reducing outages and downtime in our systems by allowing traffic segmentation, but they can create chaos without proper maintenance.
  |  By Honeycomb
Tech debt. Vendor redundancy. System fragmentation. Startups and cloud–born companies are looking at vendors for cost-cutting opportunities. But how do you balance vendor costs and value when those resources and tools bring efficiencies as high as the monthly bills? In this session, Charity Majors and Gergely Orosz share advice on managing spend in a vendor-dependent world.
  |  By Honeycomb
Hear from Odyssey Interactive to learn how they implemented Honeycomb to accelerate development time and resolve issues quickly.
  |  By Honeycomb
Honeycomb's trace-aware proxy, Refinery, allows you to sample your data to reduce costs while giving you the ability to ensure the lowest margin of error on your most important data.
  |  By Honeycomb
Honeycomb is an event-based observability tool, but you can-and should-use metrics alongside your events. Fortunately, Honeycomb can analyze both types of data at the same time. When maturing from metrics-based application monitoring to an observability-based development practice, there are considerations that can make the transformation easier for you and your team.
  |  By Honeycomb
Evaluating observability tools can be a daunting task when you're unfamiliar with key considerations and possibilities. This guide steps through various capabilities for observability tooling and why they matter.
  |  By Honeycomb
This document discusses the history, concept, goals, and approaches to achieving observability in today's software industry, with an eye to the future benefits and potential evolution of the software development practice as a whole.

Honeycomb is a tool for introspecting and interrogating your production systems. We can gather data from any source—from your clients (mobile, IoT, browsers), vendored software, or your own code. Single-node debugging tools miss crucial details in a world where infrastructure is dynamic and ephemeral. Honeycomb is a new type of tool, designed and evolved to meet the real needs of platforms, microservices, serverless apps, and complex systems.

Honeycomb provides full stack observability—designed for high cardinality data and collaborative problem solving, enabling engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together. Founded on the experience of debugging problems at the scale of millions of apps serving tens of millions of users, we empower every engineer to instrument and query the behavior of their system.