Honeycomb Reviews

Honeycomb has made it very easy to ingest any kind of structured data and "slice and dice it" to figure out what is really happening with our systems. We have extracted a lot of value from database query logs, load balancer logs, CDN logs, even Kubernetes events! However, it's at analyzing application traces where it really shines.

The game changer is the "bubble up" feature: it tells you which dimension of an event is more likely to be responsible for an anomaly, and that is super useful when you are troubleshooting an incident or want to answer tricky questions such as "which API calls are causing us to not meet our Service Level Objectives?".

Finally, I have to add: Honeycomb's pricing model (event-based instead of machine/CPU/license based) is probably the most cloud-friendly option out there.

Some aspects of the UI/UX could be improved. It is easy to jump on and start asking meaningful questions about your data, but it can also be a bit overwhelming to new users who are more accustomed to more traditional "point-and-click" interfaces. The online interactive tutorials are very well made and do help a lot though.

The query interface is a joy to work with, literally. It is literally the product I've wanted for decades. I even started building pieces of it a very long time ago internally, but Honeycomb makes every prototype I've ever built look like the toys they were. I can't say enough good things about it.

The query history and social debugging features are GREAT and are a good example of how the overall Honeycomb philosophy of promoting engineer happiness shine through. I trust that the product choices they make are as much to make my job easier as it is to make buckets of money.

I could be here writing for hours and I don't know what the character limit is here, so just suffice it to say that the Query UI is amazing, the data ingestion APIs are very good, everything is well and thoughtfully designed and I can use them in a myriad of fully supported ways. Nirvana!

The only con I can think of is a lack of off-the-shelf support for PHP, which we still use quite heavily. Support is getting there through OpenTelemetry, etc.

Getting data INTO Honeycomb can be a challenge, but in the year and more that we've been using it even that con is shrinking, and quickly.

It opens up new avenues in software engineering: what if you could ask your system how it's doing?

Instrumenting everything, sampling sanely, and all the relevant data is in Honeycomb at a reasonable price. From then on forward, all the querying options are available. Bubble Up is there to help massively during incidents to find the outliers and where the problem lies.

Once this is implemented properly( not an easy feast), it feels like living in the future.

Coming from a classic( and wrong) observability=logs+metrics+traces mindset it is rather hard to get accustomed to Honeycomb. Once the mental hurdle is passed it's all sunshine and rainbows, but it takes a whole lot to get there. Fortunately, their Solution Engineers are very patient and helpful.

The ability to explore your application data in ways you did not know you needed, but once you get a taste you're hooked.

I can't think of anything about Honeycomb that I do not like. One thing to keep in mind when implementing it is to ensure your log data is well-structured with standardized field names, otherwise you won't get the most from it.

Honeycomb helps engineers deal with complexity. It rewards curiosity and makes lowers the unnecesary cognitive load for engineering modern systems. Ultimately, improves quality of life for engineers.

The instrumentation and the decisions about sampling can make or break the value users get from HC - and currently (especially for PRO subscriptions) the focus is more on the end result and not that much on how to get there.

The UI is so incredibly powerful and intuitive, even for a non-SRE like myself. Dive into trends and their traces in seconds--consistently successful and fast loading already takes a lot of pain out of debugging. I have big plans for using Honeycomb's APIs and integrations to validate and even make decisions in our CI pipeline, something I could never quite all-the-way envision before I got my hands on Honeycomb.

They try to make everything easy, but sampling is not easy and figuring out what to trace, how to trace it, and knowing what will "come out of the box" is still difficult. The level of effort required to get off the ground has been difficult for me, exacerbated by my own ambition and enthusiasm.

Honeycomb provides quickstart libraries called beelines that have helped us get up and running quickly. Once basics are in place, it does require some investment to get the right data in. This has actually proven valuable to us as we have found places to dig in based on strange behaviours in our graphs. In addition the search history being forever available and serachable across the whole org has helped to share knowledge and context.

There are two major query features that are currently being talked about but would help tremendously. One is to be able to query for span details at the trace level. The other is to have a sql style `having` in the query. Not having these means a bit of creativity sometimes but haven't been showstoppers for us.

- Easy to run aggregates across multiple fields, time ranges, and filters
- Can send custom events to add instrumentation any where in your system
- Building dashboards to save and group common queries is great for collaboration
- Queries execute quickly (usually in a second or two)
- Can click on fields to filter them out from results or drill down to just them
- Autocomplete on all inputs

- Hard to know which queries to run if you don't have a good grasp of the log fields you're sending

How easy it was to deploy a helm chart and immediately begin collecting data from pretty arbitrary services in a kubernetes cluster.

It would be nice if there were SLO support for non-Enterprise versions. Also, more integrations with other SaaS products would be nice.

It was very easy to get started with Honeycomb! The free tier is generous and the Beeline provides decent instrumentation out of the box. My team was willing to experiment with new tech but we couldn't invest a lot of time. We started out by including the Spring Boot Beeline into our app, configure a API key and we were off sending events!

I find it hard to find a thing about Honeycomb I really dislike. While the platform is missing features here and there, none of them are show stopping issues. They are mostly opportunities for Honeycomb to grow and I've noticed things are constantly changing and improving.