Observability Where You Work: Introducing the Honeycomb Slackbot in Beta

Engineers are constantly context switching between tools, adding cognitive overhead on top of already complex work. You're deep in an investigation, you need to analyze some data, pull up a runbook somewhere else, and share findings back in Slack. Context gets lost in the shuffle, correlating across data sources becomes painful, and everything just takes longer. In high-pressure situations like incidents, that friction has a real cost to the business.

Today, we're launching the Honeycomb Slackbot to beta. We’re bringing the power of observability directly into the tools where engineers work and communicate. Powered by Honeycomb Intelligence, the Slackbot returns answers from your production data in seconds without ever leaving Slack.

Where engineers actually work

Engineers live in two places: their IDE and Slack. Slack, in particular, is where the real work of debugging happens. Teams pile into channels, share hypotheses, ask questions, and piece together what's going wrong. But the data that can answer those questions has always lived somewhere else. That means someone has to leave the conversation and dig through multiple tools, perhaps bouncing from metrics to logs and back several times before returning to Slack to report findings, ultimately breaking their focus and slowing the investigation down.

The need to consult separate tools for metrics, logs, and traces also makes it harder to bring findings and evidence back to the group in a way that spurs collaboration. Instead, teammates end up staring at screenshots. The Honeycomb Slackbot closes the gap between teams and their data by bringing observability directly into the conversation.

How it works

Simply tag @Honeycomb Canvas and ask a question in any channel or direct message. Honeycomb responds with answers and supporting evidence drawn from your telemetry data. Teammates can jump in, ask follow-up questions, and build on each other's findings, turning Slack threads into living investigations rather than a series of screenshots and one-liners. Investigations in Slack are saved as Canvas investigations, enabling teams to reference previous analyses to inform future work and answers link directly to query results in Honeycomb, enabling manual investigation.

Honeycomb becomes your AI teammate: always available, working from the same data, and never breaking the collaborative flow of your team.

Use cases

Incident response

When something goes wrong, you need to move fast. Tag @Honeycomb directly in your incident channel to pull in data like: error rates, latency spikes, affected services—all without stopping to open another tab. Keep the investigation in one place so everyone stays in the loop.

Onboarding

New engineers often don't know what they don't know about a system. The Slackbot lets them ask questions about how parts of production work, what's normal vs. anomalous, and how different services relate. Instead of trying to make sense of disparate sources of documentation or pinging another teammate, they get answers from real data instantly.

Everyday debugging

When you're working through a problem and need a quick health check like latency on a specific endpoint, error trends over the past hour, or which services a deployment touched, simply @Honeycomb and get insights without having to manually run queries.

Get started

The Honeycomb Slackbot is available now in beta for Enterprise customers. Reach out to your customer success team to learn more and get set up!