Honeycomb for Frontend Observability is now generally available! Read the announcement.

Modern systems need modern tools

What is APM?

APM tools are designed to help teams monitor and optimize the performance of software applications. APM ensures that applications are meeting performance expectations and delivering a positive user experience by comparing current conditions against known thresholds. APM provides visibility into aspects of an application’s behavior, such as latency, traffic, errors, and saturation.

What is observability?

Observability is the ability to measure and understand any aspect of system or application behavior and performance. Good observability data should capture all kinds of details, like transaction IDs, API endpoints, response codes, customer IDs, input parameters, durations, byte sizes, and just about anything else you think might be useful later. The more data you can capture, the better.

Read more in our article explaining the differences between APM vs. observability

Honeycomb observability vs. APM


Analyze telemetry data faster

Capabilities
Honeycomb
APM

Quickly filter results by unlimited high-cardinality dimensions

Slow, expensive analysis, costly dimensions, pre-indexing required

Speed of query results

Instant, with uncapped cardinality and thousands of dimensions

Results only return quickly when data is pre-aggregated

Speed of data query availability after ingestion

Newly ingested telemetry is available to query in under 5s

Some telemetry available after seconds, some vendors need several minutes

Get quickly alerted for issues in production

Capabilities
Honeycomb
APM

Deciding what to monitor

Monitor what you choose and know what’s important behind SLOs

Monitor what’s come up in the past

Taking action on an alert

Debug SLO-triggered alerts using the same tool

One tool to alert, another tool to debug

Decreasing alert noise

Trigger single alerts before user experience degrades

Many alerts are grouped together, AI decides priority

Measuring failure or success

Uses individual requests to measure requests succeeded vs. requests failed

Uses metrics to measure good minutes vs. bad minutes

Isolate the source of issues in near real-time

Capabilities
Honeycomb
APM

Correlation detection

Surface hidden patterns behind issues within any graph or query result.

Trust AI suggestions on what metrics to attend to

Triage workflow

Use one workflow, driven by querying and first principles, to surface relevant telemetry data

Analyze different dashboards, then switch to other tools based on intuition

Know where to start

Quickly find the relevant context, regardless of prior experience

Fast analysis requires intuition and prior experience with a system

Onboard the organization easily

Capabilities
Honeycomb
APM

Supporting vendor-neutral standards

OpenTelemetry is standard and compatible with all features

Recommend proprietary agents and libraries, but may support OpenTelemetry

Cross-team adoption

Unlimited hosts, seats, users, etc. Simple pricing encourages adoption

Price increases the more you use it (per host, seats, service, teams, etc.)

Ability for anyone to query

Build queries intuitively with a visual UI. Ask questions in plain English with Query Assistant

Learn proprietary query languages