Honeycomb

Honeycomb is an observability platform designed to help engineering teams investigate and resolve issues in complex cloud applications. Founded in 2016, the company offers a unique approach to monitoring and debugging distributed systems. Honeycomb's platform unifies logs, metrics, and traces into a single data type, allowing engineers to query and analyze high-cardinality data across billions of data points in seconds. This capability enables teams to detect patterns and anomalies in real-time, providing insights into how users experience their code in production environments.

The platform's architecture is built to handle the unpredictability and complexity of modern cloud-native applications, containerization, and microservices. Honeycomb's datastore is datatype agnostic, which allows it to avoid the data correlation problems often faced by traditional Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools. The company's solution includes features such as distributed tracing, intelligent data sampling, and debuggable Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Honeycomb also offers BubbleUp, a feature that automatically compares attributes across millions of requests to reveal anomalies, and a Service Map for visualizing system dependencies.

Honeycomb's pricing model is based on event volume rather than the number of seats, servers, or fields, which the company claims makes costs more predictable for customers. The platform supports OpenTelemetry, providing SDKs for popular programming languages to facilitate data ingestion. In January 2024, Honeycomb deployed a SaaS cloud in the European Union to support GDPR compliance and local data residency regulations for its European customers.

Key customers and partnerships

Honeycomb's customer base includes notable companies such as HelloFresh, Stripe, Slack, Fender, Vanguard, and LaunchDarkly. The company reported having over 600 customers worldwide as of April 2023.

In March 2024, Honeycomb announced a strategic partnership with Focused Labs, aiming to modernize legacy systems and enhance observability practices. This collaboration is designed to provide customers with a comprehensive approach to implementing Honeycomb's platform, including OpenTelemetry instrumentation, data pipeline setup, and customized training.