Introducing Anomaly Detection: Your Early Warning System for Service Health

Modern engineering teams face a persistent challenge: knowing when something goes wrong before their customers do. With microservices architectures sprawling across dozens or hundreds of services, creating comprehensive alerting becomes an overwhelming task. You're left playing whack-a-mole with manual alert configurations, often missing critical issues or drowning in false positives.

Today, we're excited to announce our solution to this challenge: Anomaly Detection (currently in alpha), Honeycomb's proactive approach to understanding and acting on service health.

The problem: alert fatigue meets alert gaps

Engineering teams today struggle with a fundamental monitoring paradox. On one hand, they need comprehensive coverage across all their services. On the other, they lack the time and expertise to properly configure alerts for every service they own, especially as that number continues to grow.

The result? Teams end up with too many services and not enough ownership. Services multiply faster than teams can assign monitoring responsibility which results in poor or missing alert setups. If left unattended too long, services can become a critical part of the signal chain without adequate alerting coverage. When teams are able to invest in their alerting, they often struggle to understand how best to tune thresholds and identify the known unknowns that are most indicative of a growing customer problem.

A new approach: proactive, intelligent detection

Anomaly Detection represents a fundamentally different philosophy in Honeycomb. Rather than requiring teams to predict what might go wrong and configure alerts accordingly, our system learns your service patterns and proactively notifies you when behavior deviates from normal.

When you combine this with BubbleUp, which shows you the outliers around an anomalous event, you can get a very detailed picture of both the what and why on your way to understanding the root cause.

The system is designed with opinionated defaults that work out of the box, while still providing the tuning capabilities teams need. It is optimized for accuracy, ensuring that when you get an alert, it's worth investigating.

Built for real-life scenarios

Anomaly Detection is purpose-built for teams who:

• Are onboarding new services and need monitoring coverage immediately
• Manage large service portfolios where manual alert configuration doesn't scale
• Lack comprehensive alerting across their critical systems
• Want to reduce alert maintenance overhead while improving coverage

The system adapts based on your actual traffic patterns, not theoretical thresholds. It integrates seamlessly with the rest of Honeycomb's observability platform, creating natural pathways to establish permanent monitoring through SLOs as you can always be on top of the state of your customers’ experiences.

More than a feature: a foundation

We're not building Anomaly Detection as an isolated capability. It represents a foundational shift in how Honeycomb helps teams understand and maintain service health. As we continue to iterate you’ll see anomaly insights across the product, from Home to Service Map, giving you routes into investigations that you didn’t have before. Today, we’re starting with detection for common metrics like error rate, latency, and requests, but we’ll expand much further than that, including custom events specific to your application. Our algorithmic approach will grow as well, including forecasting and adaptive approaches that remove the guesswork our competitors require.

We’re also building deeper contextual insights; future versions will feed directly into an agentic experience that can provide even more sophisticated analysis and mitigation recommendations.

Getting started

Anomaly Detection is currently available in alpha for select customers.

Contact your Honeycomb customer success manager to learn more about joining the alpha program and experiencing the future of intelligent service health detection.