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Honeycomb Reviews & Product Details

Avinash U.
AU
DevOps Engineer-I
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: G2 invite
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

The BubbleUp feature, which provides a clear view of the data at a particular time interval, is beneficial for knowing what's wrong with the system. Another handy feature is the Query History, which provides information about the queries run by others on the team. This is helpful in cases we can use a teammates query and modify it for our use case without brainstorming the entire query. The UI is very intuitive, and the Honeycomb team provides excellent support in terms of training and getting set up. Honeycomb works well with open telemetry, which is a massive benefit due to no vendor lock-in. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

Although it is a wonderful solution for observability, it is not the complete solution for monitoring and observability due to the lack of features like Real User Monitoring, which is very relevant to our product. There is no live tail of logs and way to setup archiving/retention of data in Honeycomb yet. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

We used Honeycomb as our observability solution. It paid off well since the data presented by Honeycomb was perfect for troubleshooting, and we were able to identify issues quickly using the tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Honeycomb Overview

What is Honeycomb?

Honeycomb is the observability platform that enables engineering teams to find and solve problems they couldn't before. Honeycomb’s approach is fundamentally different from other tools that claim observability, and is built to help teams answer novel questions about their ever-evolving cloud applications. Other tools silo your data across disjointed pillars (logs, metrics, and traces), are too slow, and constrain teams to only answering predetermined questions. Honeycomb unifies all data sources in a single type, returning queries in seconds – not minutes – and revealing critical issues that logs and metrics alone can’t see. Using the power of distributed tracing and a query engine designed for highly-contextual telemetry data, Honeycomb reveals both why a problem is happening and who specifically is impacted.

Honeycomb Details
Product Website
Languages Supported
English
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Product Description

Honeycomb provides full stack observabilitydesigned for high cardinality data and collaborative problem solving, enabling engineers to deeply understand and debug production software together


Seller Details
Company Website
Year Founded
2016
HQ Location
San Francisco, US
Twitter
@honeycombio
15,016 Twitter followers
LinkedIn® Page
www.linkedin.com
237 employees on LinkedIn®
Description

Honeycomb.io is a platform designed for observability and debugging of complex systems, enabling developers and engineering teams to understand, troubleshoot, and optimize their applications in real-time. It provides powerful tools for analyzing and visualizing performance data, allowing users to gain deep insights into their software's behavior. With features like event tracking, collaboration tools, and advanced querying capabilities, Honeycomb.io helps organizations improve reliability and enhance their overall application performance.


Kate G.
KG
Overview Provided by:

Recent Honeycomb Reviews

Bruno C.
BC
Bruno C.Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
4.5 out of 5
"Observability Tool That Drives the Industry"
On a practical level, the platform offers a range of tools that enhance our understanding of systems. It features an easy-to-use yet powerful query...
MB
Michael B.Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
5.0 out of 5
"Powerful tool with amazing support team"
The querying engine is really powerful. It lets you understand your system through strong correlation and anomaly detection.
Verified User
E
Verified UserMid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
5.0 out of 5
"Top Tier Observability"
Honeycomb is an intuitive and effective tool for observability. We have saved countless hours solving issues by using Honeycomb, which has translat...
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14 out of 15 Total Reviews for Honeycomb

4.7 out of 5
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14 out of 15 Total Reviews for Honeycomb
4.7 out of 5
14 out of 15 Total Reviews for Honeycomb
4.7 out of 5

Honeycomb Pros and Cons

How are these determined?Information
Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
Pros
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Overall Review Sentiment for HoneycombQuestion

Time to Implement
<1 day
>12 months
Return on Investment
<6 months
48+ months
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Bruno C.
BC
Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

On a practical level, the platform offers a range of tools that enhance our understanding of systems. It features an easy-to-use yet powerful query engine, excellent visualizations, first-class Service Level Objective (SLO) support, and a robust correlations feature.

Support for OpenTelemetry has been essential for us, as it helps avoid vendor lock-in, giving us the confidence to base our decisions on the quality of the product rather than being tied to a specific vendor.

On a conceptual level, Honeycomb has elevated distributed tracing to a first-class feature, leading to new and improved approaches to production investigations, incident handling, and system design. For many teams within our company, observability has now become an integral part of the design process rather than an afterthought.

The customer support team and our account manager are excellent. They are always available to assist, highly proactive, and friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

As part of the platform team, we are also responsible for cost management. I would like to see features related to governance, quota management, and automated cost reporting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

Improved insight into our systems fosters a better user experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Martin A.
MA
VP of Engineering
Logistics and Supply Chain
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

Being able to throw events at Honeycomb without having to think about how you'll need to interrogate the date ahead of time feels a bit like magic.

It's the most stable part of our infrastructure, allowing us to focus on the problems that matter to us.

The group of humans that make up the company is also a huge part of why you should choose Honeycomb, an observability platform is an integral part of your development process so it's more akin to a partnership than a service provider.

The sales and support folks are knowledgeable, friendly and have been great partners to us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

I would love to be able to have more control in-product around quota management. It's solveable by using Refinery, but not as convenient as being able to fine-tune it as part of the SaaS offering. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

They are the first place to go to when trying to understand how our system is behaving in production. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Julian W.
JW
Senior Software Engineer
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

As a product Honeycomb is excellent, the ability to look across all of our data in such an efficient and useful way has been revoloutionary for our approach to understanding our production systems.

The customer support has been exceptional, and we have a lot of confidence in the Honeycomb employees who have given us advice as well as the documentation which they make available to lead you into a successful implementation of OpenTelemetry.

This has become a tool I use daily and is my primary method for understanding the health of our systems Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

There is a bit of a learning curve to get your head around how to use it well. The team will guide you through it, but just because of the vast amounts of data that is exposed it took some time for us to get up to speed so we can always find the most useful thing. However, once up to speed the product is incredibly easy to use Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

Honeycomb solves the problem of understanding what is happening in our production systems in a manageable way. It consumes a vast amount of observability data and allows us to ask questions on the fly that we couldn't have predicted ahead of time Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dominic M.
DM
Principal Software Engineer, Observability Architecture
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

The best thing about Honeycomb is the capability to deal with completely arbitrary data with infinite cardinality. While structure is always preferable, Honeycomb can deal with uncertainty better than any other system I've used. This means Honeycomb is great for prototyping as well as full on vetted production systems. Throw anything at it and it can handle it witih ease and precision. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

Sometimes I feel like the data retention period is not long enough, but if you know that limitation going in, it doesn't really matter. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

Honeycomb is integral to our Observability platform, enabling developers, infrastructure, management, and others to fully see the states of our production system. Honeycomb, among other things, is the primary point of distributed trace access for our systems and we can't think of a better product for this. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Tyler K.
TK
Director of Software Engineering
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

Honeycomb is very easy to get started with. It was the tool that we saw the most developer engagement with. Their pricing model also allows everyone who is curious to have access to the data. Their team is also amazing to work with. They genuinely want to see you succeed in your observability journey. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

It's hard to come up with cons. Adding all of your infrastructure events to Honeycomb can be expensive without sampling. However, we use it primarily for application observability. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

Honeycomb provides application observabillity using standard open telemetry libraries. It encourages high dimensionality and high cardinality data. They also offer a ton of training and resources to help get you started. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

MB
Senior Developper
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

The querying engine is really powerful. It lets you understand your system through strong correlation and anomaly detection. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

I would love to see a better visualization of the SLOs, especially being able to see multiple budget burns at once (from different SLOs) on a custom time frame. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lack of visibility of what is hapening in production and also a centralized place to store all these informations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Financial Services
EF
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

Honeycomb is an intuitive and effective tool for observability. We have saved countless hours solving issues by using Honeycomb, which has translated into happier engineers and customers. On top of all that, they have a great team that is highly engaged with us. They act as partners and genuinely listen to our feedback. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

There isn't anything to dislike. It's not cheap, but with Honeycomb, you get what you pay for. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Honeycomb to ensure our platform is performing within the SLAs we have with our customers. We rely on a number of downstream vendors and Honeycomb is also helpful for surfacing any issues that may occur with those parties. In addition, we use Honeycomb extensively during our deploys to ensure that we resolves any introduced issues in a timely fashion. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Simon D.
SD
Senior Research Software Engineer
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

Bubble up features and correlations, and the ability to jump back and forth between high-level aggregation and low-level individual request detail Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

It *only* does timeseries, no roll ups or longer aggregation. They have good reasons for this, but it does mean for business metric reporting, you still need something else Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

Incident response, improving MTTR, capacity planning, and more generaly understanding how users are using our system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Benjamin O.
BO
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

The deep analysis possible on super high cardinality data and traces makes it our first stop when troubleshooting or working an incident. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

Nothing really. Perhaps some more development in traditional o11y spaces that we still need (legacy logs, Prometheus metrics visualization, etc.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

Reducing mean time to issue identification and resolution with our products and systems Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Blake I.
BI
Observability Engineering Lead
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Honeycomb?

Honey, let's you think about your production telemetry like an analyst would think about customer data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Honeycomb?

It's not free 😂 (but the pricing model is super easy to work with). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Honeycomb solving and how is that benefiting you?

Honeycomb helps my engineering teams more rapidly orient themselves when dealing with issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.