OpenTelemetry

Instrumenting AI Agents for the Agent Timeline: A Practical OpenTelemetry Guide

The LLM is rarely the root cause of agent failures. This technical guide shows how to instrument AI agents using OpenTelemetry's GenAI semantic conventions so they appear in Honeycomb's Agent Timeline—including tool calls, multi-agent handoffs, and framework-specific SDKs—so you can debug what actually went wrong.

Running the OpenTelemetry Collector as a Lambda

The OpenTelemetry Collector is usually deployed as a long-running process, but when telemetry is rare, it makes sense to run it as a Lambda function instead. Here's how to do it.

Top 7 Dynatrace Alternatives in 2026

Evaluating Dynatrace alternatives? Compare top observability platforms, including Honeycomb, Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, and more on features, pricing, and complexity to find the best fit for your team.

Making Semantic Conventions Work for You With OpenTelemetry Weaver

In this post, I'll show how OpenTelemetry Weaver lets you define, layer, and validate semantic convention schemas so that both humans and agents have full context on every attribute in your telemetry.

Span or Attribute in OpenTelemetry Custom Instrumentation

When you want to add some information to your tracing telemetry, you could emit a log, create a span, or add a piece of data to your current span. Adding a piece of data to your current span is the best! Usually.

Top 7 Grafana Alternatives in 2026

Exploring Grafana alternatives? Compare top observability platforms, including Honeycomb, Datadog, Dynatrace, and more, on features, pricing, and ease of use to find the right fit for your team.

Taming Log Noise With the OpenTelemetry Collector's Drain Processor

Do you receive 50 million log lines per day and struggle to see what actually matters? Health checks, heartbeat pings, connection pool messages—they all drown out the errors and anomalies you're trying to find. What if the Collector could figure out the patterns for you?

Managing OpenTelemetry Semantic Convention Migrations With the Collector

This is what a semantic convention migration looks like in practice: not a clean cutover, but months of coexistence where old and new attribute names overlap. In this post, I'll explain why this happens, how the OpenTelemetry Collector's schema processor is designed to automate migrations in both directions, and what we're actively working on to get it into a state where everyone can use it.

Fast AI Feedback Loops with Honeycomb and OpenTelemetry

Observability is the visibility you need to get the job done. Sending telemetry to Honeycomb explains what your agents are actually doing. OpenTelemetry provides semantic conventions for generative AI systems, a spec that defines how agents, LLMs, MCPs, and tools are properly observed. The primary telemetry is defined as trace spans and other events with specific naming patterns, mostly starting with gen_ai.

Optimizing the OpenTelemetry Python SDK for LLM Workloads

The performance impact of instrumentation on running applications should be minimized wherever possible, and this is what led to the investigation described in this article.

How Honeycomb Supercharges OpenTelemetry for AI

The nature of software development has changed as AI-code generation and agent-based features gain adoption. In perhaps a more subtle shift, the fundamentals of software instrumentation are changing too.

OpAMP Explained: Why OpenTelemetry Needed an Agent Management Protocol (and How We Use It)

In this post, I’ll explain what OpAMP is and why OpenTelemetry created it, then dive into how we use it to power Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline.

Enhancements to Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline Deliver Greater Visibility, Smarter Control, and Lower Costs

Today, we’re introducing the latest enhancements to Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline, which give teams deeper visibility into pipeline health, more efficient access to archived telemetry data, and reduced operational complexity.

How to Replace Synthetics with the httpcheck Receiver

You've probably seen it: your health check endpoint returns success, but your users are staring at an error page. This is the reality of monitoring HTTP endpoints in production—status codes alone don't tell the whole story.

Integrating JMX and OpenTelemetry

The OpenTelemetry community and the contributors to the Java Special Interest Group (SIG) have spent a great deal of time integrating core Java technologies into the project. An integration that is particularly useful is Java Management Extensions (JMX).

Honeycomb Launches Integration With the Anthropic Usage and Cost API

We’re proud to announce an integration suite to help you monitor and understand your Claude usage and costs not just in Honeycomb, but in any observability tool that supports OpenTelemetry.

What Is OpenTracing? A Walk Down Tracing History

OpenTracing was created to solve this problem by providing a vendor-neutral implementation to instrument code for distributed tracing. Over time, the community recognized the need for a broader, unified standard that went beyond tracing to also include metrics and logs.

The Fast Path to More Useful Telemetry

Can Claude Code Observe Its Own Code?

One of the great things about OpenTelemetry is that it’s a standard, and standards tend to proliferate. I was excited to see Claude Code add OpenTelemetry metric and log support in a recent release.

Observability Without Tradeoffs: Introducing Powerful New Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline Features