Honeycomb

San Francisco, CA, USA
2016
  |  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 Martin Thwaites
Naming things, and specifically consistently naming things, is still one of the most useful pieces of work you can do in telemetry. It’s often overlooked as something that will just happen naturally and won’t cause too much of an issue—but it doesn’t happen naturally, it does cause issues, and you end up having to fix the data in pipelines or your backend tool.
  |  By Rox Williams
Phorest wanted a tool to help foster a culture of observability among the engineers at an affordable and predictable price. With their application stack hosted on AWS, Phorest delivers a premier software solution that empowers their salon and spa business customers to thrive. Ensuring every engineer has access to an observability tool is integral to the company's success model, enabling them to deliver great code for their designated software services.
  |  By Chris Lasher
In this post, I describe how to send OpenTelemetry (OTel) data from an AWS Lambda instance to Honeycomb. I will be showing these steps using a Lambda written in Python and created and deployed using AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM).
  |  By Fred Hebert
There are countless challenges around incident investigations and reports. Aside from sensitive situations revolving around blame and corrections, tricky problems come up when having discussions with multiple stakeholders. The problems I’ll explore in this blog—from the SRE perspective—are about time pressures (when to ship the investigation) and the type of report people expect.
  |  By Alex Boten
There is so much good work that OpenTelemetry has done in the software industry, specifically around the domain of observability, in the last five years. Bringing users and vendors together to define the future of telemetry? Check! Unify logs, traces, and metrics under a completely vendor-neutral API? Check! Deprecate other standards by bringing their collaborators to the table to ensure their use cases are met? CHECK!
  |  By Jessica Kerr
In twenty years of software development, I did not have the privilege of being on call, of tending to my software in production. I’ve never understood what “APM” means. Anybody can tell me what it stands for—Application Performance Monitoring (or sometimes, the M means Management)—but what does it mean? What do people use APM for?
  |  By Rox Williams
Birdie wanted to uplevel observability to a platform that would provide meaningful insights for application performance and debugging. Ensuring customers can provide seamless and timely care to in-home patients stands as a top priority for Birdie, and the development team takes pride in building and maintaining a high-quality platform distinguished by its reliability and responsiveness.
  |  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
Istio service meshes enable organizations to secure, connect, and monitor microservices to modernize their enterprise apps more swiftly and securely. With the addition of distributed tracing and powerful observability tooling, platform operators can gain immediate actionable insights about their applications.
  |  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.