Honeycomb is an event-based observability tool. Rather than relying on the rigid pre-aggregated measures provided by metrics, Honeycomb instead favors using events because they provide a much greater degree of flexibility. But that doesn’t mean metrics don’t belong in Honeycomb. Our new whitepaper, Getting Started With Honeycomb Metrics, breaks down exactly how to do that.

As a Customer Advocate, I talk to a lot of prospective Honeycomb users who want to understand how observability fits into their existing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice. While I have enough of a familiarity with the discipline to get myself into trouble, I wanted to learn more about what SREs do in their day-to-day work so that I’d be better able to help them determine if Honeycomb is a good fit for their needs.

At Honeycomb, we talk a lot about eating our own dogfood. Since we use Honeycomb to observe Honeycomb, we have many opportunities to try out UX changes ourselves before rolling them out to all of our users. UX doesn’t stop at the UI though! Developer experience matters too, especially when getting started with observability. We often get questions about the difference between using our Beeline SDKs compared with other integrations, especially OpenTelemetry (abbreviated “OTel”).

Thanks to awesome contributions from the community and the hard work of our integrations team, the Honeycomb Rails integration comes with lots of great features out of the box. This post is an end-to-end tutorial to show you exactly the steps involved, from creating a new Honeycomb team to getting your data in and observing your app in production.