Software Engineering  

How To Talk to Your Boss About Honeycomb

By Rachel Perkins  |   Last modified on February 7, 2019

At Honeycomb, we're pretty engineering-focused. We think our product is something every developer can benefit from, and we're working to build something we would want to (and do!) use every day to make our own jobs easier. But what we should talk about more is what some folks call "business value" or ROI - so if you're an engineer who has seen what Honeycomb offers and wants their boss, their organization to invest in Honeycomb - here is some news you can use:

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Business incentives to use Honeycomb

Honeycomb.io provides real-time system debugging, distributed tracing for microservices,and logging, alerting, dashboards, and observability for services. Architecting, planning, configuring, deploying, and maintaining an internal equivalent would cost orders of magnitude more than using Honeycomb’s service.

“The best part about Honeycomb is how easy it is to make it useful” - Alex Newman, Co-founder, hCaptcha

Wondering what Honeycomb can do for your business?

Increased productivity

Stripe's 2018 Developer Coefficient report, which surveyed thousands of C-level executives and developers across six diferent countries, states that “96% of C-level executives consider it a priority to increase the productivity of their developers.”

Honeycomb Beelines instrument code automatically so developers can immediately move on to fit and finish. BubbleUp instantly surfaces outliers and brings unusual events into view so debugging happens faster. Tracing visualization right inline with the rest of your monitoring and debugging toolset means no time is lost to context-switching—you bring the context right along with you to the visualization you need to solve the problem.

With Honeycomb, your team will:

Ship more often

When you've got the access to observability Honeycomb offers, you have the confidence to ship code more often—knowing that if something does go wrong, you will find out sooner, diagnose the issue faster, and resolve the problem right away. At Honeycomb customer Tapjoy, “We felt confident cutting over in much faster cycles, almost all at once, because we knew we'd see anything wrong immediately, in real-time—AND we'd be able to dig into it and find the cause in minutes.”

Produce better code

Observability-Driven Development with Honeycomb gives your engineers the tools to see what matters to your customers, so they can make better choices up front and every time they ship.

Spend less time debugging and spend more time creating value

Per the Stripe report, “...the average developer spends more than 17 hours a week dealing with maintenance issues, such as debugging and refactoring. In addition, they spend approximately four hours a week on “bad code,” which equates to nearly $85 billion worldwide in opportunity cost lost annually.

When your team is constantly in the weeds without the ability to fully investigate and resolve issues in production code, they are prevented from creating new value for your organization. With Honeycomb, you find and solve issues faster, leaving your team more time to innovate and benefit the business.

Leverage collective intelligence and work as a unified team

When your team is using Honeycomb, all the knowledge an individual team member gains when exploring your systems—as part of investigating an issue, researching parts of the code that are new to them, or simply exploring—is available to the entire team, forever. Honeycomb doesn't just allow you to leverage the troubleshooting and programming experience of your most skilled teammates across your entire team, the UI actively encourages this behavior.

Extend the knowledge and productivity gains to other teams

Ops and Support teams also solve issues faster with Honeycomb, and without needing to pull engineering into on-call or customer-reported issues. The time saved means more bandwidth to improve customer service and provide valuable feedback to engineering.

Decreased downtime

Decreasing downtime is an obvious money saver. According to Gartner, the average cost of network downtime alone in 2014 was around $5,600 per minute; around $300,000 per hour— and no one believes that number has decreased since then. No matter your business, downtime always means lost income, and it can mean significantly more than that over the long term.

When you use Honeycomb, you'll know sooner when something is wrong, and solve problems more quickly.

  • Because you're shipping better code, you'll have fewer problems over time. You'll eradicate your known unknowns, and be able to focus on the unknown unknowns. Honeycomb customer BHVR Interactive told us that in addition to solving new problems as they arise, they’re now able to go back and dig into problems they had given up on ever solving previously— increasing the performance and resiliency of their code every step of the way.
  • With Honeycomb, you'll avoid the untold costs of developing a reputation for being down and not being able to figure it out — lost confidence in your service means you could potentially lose a lot more revenue over time than just what the actual downtime cost you.

Happier developers

Almost 80% of developers surveyed said that working on poor-quality code or inscrutable legacy systems had a negative impact on their morale.

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Additionally, per the Stripe report, “Senior executives report that the lack of developer talent is one of the biggest potential threats to their businesses. In fact, they now worry about access to developers more than they worry about access to capital, immigration concerns, and other challenges.”

  • If your developers have access to wide events and deep traces, they will feel more in control of their code and its behavior in production. They'll be able to improve their own lives, as well as the lives of their colleagues (and of course, those of your customers). In addition to the blazing fast query response, thoughtfully-laid-out interface, and full complement of analytics and visualization tools, Honeycomb's collaboration features let each team member access and leverage the entire team's experience when on call—a much less stressful experience than 'going it alone'.
  • Hiring new developers is a big resource sink. If your developers are happier, they will be less likely to leave your team. You'll experience less churn and spend less valuable time bringing new people up to speed. And when you do hire, Honeycomb makes it much easier to onboard new developers—all that collective intelligence is there to help convey the current state of your infrastructure and services and how to debug them.

Greater customer satisfaction

Ultimately, what matters is what your customers think and say about your service. Happier customers don't churn, and according to Forbes, it can cost five times more to attract a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.

  • Using Honeycomb allows you to better serve the customers you already have, so they can help you get new ones — happier customers tell their colleagues, and the value of free marketing is extremely high. According to Lithium's 2017 study of over 3000 consumers71% of adults in the U.S. would share a positive experience with other consumers.
  • With Honeycomb, you'll find and resolve problems before they notice. For example, Fender were able to drill into their data using Honeycomb and identify the exact users impacted by an issue so rapidly that their Customer Support team was able to contact those users before they contacted Fender to report an issue.

And when a customer does notice an issue, you'll be able to provide high-touch service and attention.

“Every day, Honeycomb helps us find misconfigurations so we can reach out to our customers and improve their experience.” - Alex Newman, Co-founder, hCaptcha

Haven't tried Honeycomb yet? Sign up for a free trial and find out what Honeycomb can offer your business.

 

 

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