Traces are comprised of multiple spans. Each span in a trace is counted as one event by Honeycomb. Each SpanEvent or Link (in OpenTelemetry and OpenCensus) count as one event. Below is an example of an event that is one span with multiple attributes:

// trace span
{ Timestamp : 2018-08-20T22:29:59.978735688Z , availability_zone : us-east-1 , build_id : 3150 , customer_id : 1810 , durationMs :448, endpoint : /api/v2/tickets , endpoint_shape : /api/v2/tickets , fraud_dur :112, hostname : app24 , id : 6ee0d492cc3cbdc0 , is_error :0, mysql_dur :312, name : /api/v2/tickets , platform : android , serviceName : api , status_code :200, traceId : 6ee0d492cc3cbdc0 , user_id : 483437 }

From the Honeycomb web UI, find the Usage page under Team Settings. This page shows your team’s event volume for the last 60 days. In the table at the bottom of the page, you’ll also find the number of events received per dataset.

Team event limits are based on calendar months, regardless of the selected plan or when the team signed up. For example, if you started using Honeycomb with a billing day on the 10th of each month, all of your capacity management logic is still pinned to calendar month. The counter resets on the 1st of each month, even if your billing date is on the 10th. We use 30.4 days as the denominator for calculating daily ingest targets for events (eg. 100M EPM / 30.4 days = daily target of 3.29M events).

We send you a notification to let you know you have exceeded your monthly event limit. The goal of the notification is to give you time to either adjust your instrumentation down or upgrade to a bigger plan. If you have a second consecutive overage month, we send a notification that we’ll begin throttling your events to bring you down to your monthly event limit. You have 10 days from that notification to take remediation action before throttling begins.

We’ve added Burst Protection as a new measure to help account for unexpected spikes in traffic. Burst Protection automatically activates when you exceed your daily event target by at least 2X. With Burst Protection, any events in excess of the daily event target will not be counted against your team’s EPM limit. As an example, let’s say your team has a daily event target of 10 million events. One day, you see a spike in traffic and you send 30 million events to Honeycomb. Burst Protection automatically activates and the excess 20 million events sent that day will not be counted against your EPM limit. Burst protection can be triggered up to three times in a calendar month.

You receive a notification when Burst Protection is triggered. The effect of burst protection will also be visible on the Usage tab of your Team Settings page. While excess events under Burst Protection are not counted against your team’s EPM limits, they are considered successful events and they still appear in your per-dataset breakdown.

Event size limits are generous. Events are limited to 100kb size with a maximum of 2000 columns. Events over this size are rejected by Honeycomb with an error code in the API response. See our Events API documentation for more information.For reference, all of the text displayed on this FAQ page (including the intro and table of contents) is approximately 9kb in size.

No, additional sales tax will be added to the monthly/annual bill in compliance with state guidelines and Honeycomb will remit them on your behalf to the appropriate entity. Please contact sales@honeycomb.io for more information.

Events are not cell phone minutes. Sorry, you can’t roll them over.