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

Observability meets modern metrics

Ask questions on the fly and proactively fix customer issues with metrics enhanced by high-cardinality application observability.

Is the problem in your code or
infrastructure?

Honeycomb Metrics are the key to faster debugging and incident resolution. Get a comprehensive view of your application and its underlying dependencies with essential system metrics displayed alongside application observability data. Surface which events have the highest degree of difference across thousands of high-cardinality and high-dimensionality events to quickly zero in on problems originating from code issues. And now, easily explore system-level issues side by side. With Honeycomb Metrics, you no longer have to waste valuable time by going to a separate tool—sometimes even a separate team—to investigate system issues.

With Honeycomb Metrics, we’re able to very easily switch between searching, visualizing, and viewing raw metrics data all in one place.

The Honeycomb query interface is awesome for metrics, just as it is for events. With just a few clicks, getting insights and clarity from our metrics has never been easier.

Sarah Sherbondy

Principal Engineer, Platform Observability

Metrics are just one piece of the puzzle

Application Metrics

By design, application metrics are aggregate measures. Once calculated, they can’t be decomposed back into individual event parts to understand how individual requests behave. A metrics dashboard will tell you that something is wrong, but you can’t click into it to explore exactly why. So you spin up new dashboards and try to correlate metrics with log and trace data, but you are still left guessing at exactly where the problem is, and which users are affected.

Application Observability

Observability with Honeycomb provides so much more info than what you can get out of metrics alone. Unlike metrics, which provide indirect signals about user experience, tracing in Honeycomb models how your users are actually interacting with your system, surfacing up relevant events by comparing across all columns. From an alert, you are able to directly query your event data (with lightning-fast results), use machine analysis tools, and leverage distributed tracing as your only debugging tool, consolidating logs and metrics use cases into one workflow.

A modern approach to using metrics

Cloud. Kubernetes. Serverless. The world is moving out of data centers and to a place where developers concentrate more on code, where the business value lies, and less on underlying abstract components like infrastructure. Metrics were designed for a different era, dominated by on-prem machines and monolithic applications. Other tools silo your data across disjointed pillars (logs, metrics, and traces), are too slow, and constrain teams to only answering predetermined questions. Honeycomb unifies all data sources in a single type, returning queries in seconds—not minutes—and revealing critical issues that logs and metrics alone can’t see.