Expanding Access, Not Risk: Using the Read-Only Role in Honeycomb Teams

Observability works best when everyone who needs visibility can get it without the risk of unintentional changes. Honeycomb’s role-based access control system helps teams strike that balance with a selection of Owner, Member, and Read-Only member roles.

This control gives teams more flexibility in how they share access across their organization, helping you scale visibility safely without sacrificing control.

Why Read-Only roles matter

The Read-Only role is designed for anyone who needs to explore Honeycomb dashboards, queries, and datasets, but doesn’t need to modify or create anything. It supports teams that want to expand visibility, reduce risk, and move faster together.

Reduce risk with least-privilege access: Read-Only access gives users just enough visibility to explore data safely—good security hygiene and good practice.

Build trust through visibility: When everyone can see the same data, teams can debug issues and discuss service health with shared context.

Remove bottlenecks; move faster: No more gatekeeping access. Stakeholders can get visibility early and often while production data stays protected.

It’s a simple adjustment that removes friction while maintaining guardrails.

Safer, faster collaboration

Sometimes, you just need more eyes on production data, but giving everyone edit access can feel like handing out loaded paintbrushes in a gallery. That’s where Read-Only access comes in.

When new teammates join, they can dive right in. It’s the fastest way to turn onboarding into understanding. Product managers, support engineers, and leadership can all check dashboards, track service health, and follow along with incidents, with risk.

When compliance checks or audits occur, you can easily draw the line between who can view and who can edit. It’s clarity and confidence, built right into your access controls, so no one slows down just to stay safe.

Get started

Assigning a Read-Only role is simple:

1. Log in to your Honeycomb instance.
2. Go to Team Settings.
3. Invite a new user by email. The default role is now Read-Only.
4. Adjust roles anytime as responsibilities change.

Read-Only users can:

• View all datasets, queries, and boards
• Explore dashboards and saved queries
• Run query results with filters, but not save or modify them

They’ll see clear “View-Only” banners and disabled edit controls, so it’s always clear what level of access they have. Here’s a short video that shows you exactly what to do to enable Read-Only mode: