OpenTelemetry that just works
Honeycomb’s industry-leading support for OpenTelemetry lets you maximize the value of your data with less effort—including the nondeterministic telemetry AI agents produce. Whether you’re just starting out or scaling up, Honeycomb is your trusted partner.
Why you’ll love Honeycomb
Unified observability
View your data from any angle—traces, logs, or graphs—and uncover insights effortlessly. Humans and agents share one platform, one source of truth, and they can experiment with multiple tools, all with no vendor lock-in.
Fix issues faster than ever
Pinpoint anomalies and resolve issues fast, even those produced by AI workflows. Honeycomb is purpose-built for high-cardinality OpenTelemetry data, with sub-second queries.
Collaborative troubleshooting
Share trace waterfalls, navigate service maps, or dive into logs—all with links that maintain full context. Our engineer-friendly interface ensures teams and AI copilots collaborate effortlessly, working from the same rich data, and building on each other’s findings.
The best platform for your OpenTelemetry data
Discover how OpenTelemetry helps developers, SREs, and engineering teams deliver better software.
Why you need OpenTelemetry
Full-stack observability
Honeycomb’s integrated platform accepts structured telemetry from any source—including AI agents—replacing the need for separate APM tools. Add custom attributes for free and unlock full context: backend, frontend, and agent behavior, all in one interface.
Boost team productivity
Honeycomb unlocks the true value of OpenTelemetry. Using Honeycomb Canvas, engineers and their AI copilots can work together to debug production systems, query and investigate system health through AI, and act on insights fast. That means engineers spend less time managing telemetry, and more time shipping reliable software.
Ingest and manage data at scale
Honeycomb integrates with your existing agents and Collectors through OpenTelemetry to streamline ingestion at scale. With Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline’s Refinery 3.0 and Enhance Indexing features, you get smarter sampling and faster queries without adding operational overhead. Read about the latest Telemetry Pipeline enhancements.
OpenTelemetry documentation
Whether you’re just starting or scaling your implementation, our step-by-step guides, best practices, and detailed examples simplify the process for developers and platform engineers alike. Backed by our expertise as active OpenTelemetry contributors, the documentation empowers you to instrument, optimize, and get value from your telemetry faster—so you can focus on delivering exceptional software. Send data with OpenTelemetry.
AI agent observability, the same way
Instrument LLM calls, tool invocations, and agent handoffs using OpenTelemetry’s GenAI semantic conventions. Because it’s a standard, not a proprietary schema, your instrumentation keeps working as you swap models, frameworks, or providers. Read the Instrumenting AI Agents guide.
OpenTelemetry expertise, built in
Honeycomb plays a vital role in the OpenTelemetry community as Maintainers, Approvers, and Ambassadors—work that matters more as AI reshapes how software gets built. That gives us unmatched expertise to guide your observability journey.
5+
years of partnership with the OpenTelemetry project, since its launch
20%
of engineers at Honeycomb contribute to OpenTelemetry
5
of our engineers were top contributors to OpenTelemetry in 2024
Meet the faces behind our contributions to OpenTelemetry
The Director's Guide to the Future of Observability: AI, OpenTelemetry, and Complex Systems
This guide provides engineering leaders and decision-makers with actionable insights into building an observability strategy using OpenTelemetry. Learn how to align teams, reduce tool sprawl, and maximize the value of telemetry data to improve system performance while controlling costs.
- Why observability is the foundation of complex systems
- What the building blocks of observability are
- How observability and OpenTelemetry work together
- What to do if you don’t use OpenTelemetry
- How observability changes in the age of AI
Hear from our community
As one of the largest contributors in the OpenTelemetry space, Honeycomb shares our belief in open standards and transparency. We are excited to collaborate with them to further enhance observability and data integration within our systems.
OpenTelemetry generates high-quality, flexible telemetry data while Honeycomb’s native support for it made the two a winning combination. The instrumentation process was really straightforward thanks to Honeycomb’s SDK.
Once engineers experience good observability with Honeycomb, there’s no going back. Instrumentation ships with the code now. They won’t have it any other way.
Want to know more?
Talk to our team to arrange a custom demo or for help finding the right plan.