Honeycomb Pros and Cons

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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