Announcing New Honeycomb Management API

Starting today, Honeycomb's Management API is generally available to all Honeycomb users. The Honeycomb Management API is a set of endpoints that lets you programmatically set up, configure, and delete queries, datasets, derived columns, and more.

With this release, you can now manage Honeycomb with configuration as code either directly via API or with third-party tools, like Terraform, using the community-contributed Honeycomb provider.

New automation possibilities

Previously available in beta, Honeycomb Management API introduces new management endpoints that provide CRUD operations for columns, derived columns, datasets, query specifications, and named queries. In addition to previously existing endpoints—boards, markers, and triggers—the Management API enables more capable programmatic configuration for commonly used Honeycomb objects. This release also includes a few improvements to previously existing configuration endpoints.

That means all users can now manage Honeycomb configuration as code, enabling advanced automation of common Honeycomb tasks. For example, commonly used queries can now be captured in code and be both automatically created and saved as a board, or triggered alerts could be used to automatically create necessary queries.

The new Management API capabilities make it possible for platform teams to quickly and consistently provision common organizational Honeycomb configurations as new services are provisioned or as existing services are added to Honeycomb. During the Management API beta period, a Terraform provider for Honeycomb was created to make that even easier (thanks for the community contribution, Koenraad Verheyden!).

“This opens the door to a number of use cases important to our customers,” said Adam Stevenson, Product Manager for Honeycomb Management API. “The most obvious benefit to our customers is being able to manage Honeycomb configuration as code along with other SaaS applications they use. But more importantly, this level of automation unlocks a number of deployment scenarios that help teams move faster.”

This new capability helps extend the practice of Observability-Driven Development, where feature teams bundle instrumentation with new features and progressively release them while observing the real-time impacts of that release in their production environments.

“Before today, you could already do things like bundle instrumentation into your code before deploying it to production,” explained Adam. “But now, as part of that same deployment, you could manage everything you’d need to understand how the new feature you’re releasing behaves: a marker to know when the deployment happened, the named queries you need to watch how that deployment performs, a board so your teammates can follow along, and a trigger to alert you if other critical performance thresholds are encountered along the way.”

“We’re seeing customers like Blackbaud use the Management API to move quickly with confidence,” said Liz Fong-Jones, Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb. “The new endpoints allow them to read the status of a trigger programmatically from their continuous delivery systems, allowing them to automatically know whether a release is safe to push.”

“We can’t wait to see the other interesting ways our customers decide to apply these capabilities,” Adam concluded.

Try it yourself

As a Honeycomb customer, you have access to these capabilities today. Head over to our API docs to discover how you can start using these configuration endpoints yourself. Terraform users can also try out the new community-contributed Honeycomb Terraform Provider.

As always, the best way to let us know what you think is to drop into the Pollinators Slack group to give us your feedback. Happy automation adventures!