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In the era of AI, software development is at an inflection point, and observability has never been more critical. Teams are dealing with more code, more data, and more pressure than ever before. To navigate these new challenges, you need a partner with a strong vision for the future and a knack for looking around corners. Honeycomb is proud to be named a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms. We feel that our recognition by Gartner showcases our commitment to help engineering teams gain observability over complex environments—not just for today’s systems, but for whatever comes next.
We have worked with thousands of teams on observability over the past decade. In that time, we have seen the systems landscape grow increasingly more complex, while customer expectations continue to rise. Yet, many engineering teams grapple with fragmented tech stacks, growing telemetry volumes, and spiking observability costs that hold them back from improving business outcomes. Now, AI is putting additional pressure on teams to innovate while trying to mitigate the risks, with tools that were not built for this new paradigm.
See everything, solve anything
Honeycomb gives teams the power to dig deep into their systems without needing to know the right questions in advance. With fast, flexible querying and high cardinality data support, engineers can follow their curiosity in real time, surfacing unknown unknowns, spotting anomalies, and tracing behaviors across billions of events with ease. We’re built for open-ended investigation, so teams can quickly move from “something looks off” to “here’s exactly why.”
As systems grow more complex and unpredictable, with ephemeral infrastructure, microservices, and AI agents becoming the norm, teams don’t have time to chase clues across siloed tools or decipher oversimplified dashboards. Honeycomb’s event-first approach is purpose-built to keep pace with that complexity while delivering clear, actionable insight every step of the way.
That’s why we’re proud to be recognized by Gartner® this year and thank our customers and community for pushing us forward every day.
High-cardinality, low-waste, predictable costs
Let’s talk about cost. Observability vendors love to promote flexibility until your bill explodes. Honeycomb takes a fundamentally different approach with our event-based pricing model. Instead of penalizing customers for collecting rich, high-cardinality telemetry (the kind that actually helps you debug and improve), Honeycomb encourages it.
With our recent capabilities in fleet management via OpAMP and Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline’s ability to intelligently route, filter, sample, and hydrate data from S3 in real-time, teams now have the control to shape data volumes without compromising signal fidelity. The result? Predictable observability costs.
Building for the AI age
Alongside our Query Assistant, BubbleUp Anomaly Detection, and the Grit acquisition, we are actively adopting AI within purpose-built, developer-centric tooling. The acquisition of Grit, an open-source codebase analysis and auto-instrumentation engine, signals our strategic pivot toward AI-enhanced developer productivity. With our everlasting commitment to open standards, we are focused on radically simplifying the OpenTelemetry adoption journey with AI by automating instrumentation at the code level to unlock richer observability.
Our upcoming MCP server release makes the insights from observability data readily available wherever you need it, including inside the IDE to address code issues by both humans and AI before it’s even deployed.
Honeycomb already reduces the time to insight for LLM behavior in production. Our LLM observability capabilities provide AI engineers granular insights into how your LLMs behave in production, troubleshoot failures faster, and continuously improve model performance.
Practical strengths focused on the future
For us, the Gartner Magic Quadrant placement is a signal, not a destination. Honeycomb was built for teams thinking five steps ahead, such as platform engineers, AI engineers, SREs, platform engineers, and forward-looking DevOps teams. It’s the only observability platform that’s architecturally aligned with the future we’re all barreling toward: AI-native, event-driven, and prohibitively complex without unified data and real-time feedback loops.
If you’re building for tomorrow, you want Honeycomb in your stack today.
Download the complimentary report here.
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