Pricing Plans FAQ

• What is an event?
  In Honeycomb, an event is a line of data that you send as a JSON object posted to our API. This data can capture anything in your system that’s worth tracking; typically, a trace span or structured log, including all context fields that your application is instrumented to generate. A single event includes fields with unlimited cardinality and can be very wide to include thousands of dimensions of context — with no additional charge. Honeycomb customers are encouraged to take advantage of this by sending wide events, like structured logs with many attributes, span events with a trace ID tied to all user context, or a metric with many attributes compressed to a single timestamp. These events get analyzed in seconds whenever your team runs a query in Honeycomb. Examples of a single event: A span with multiple attributes: <b>// trace span</b> <b>{"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"}</b> A narrow event with just a timestamp, host, and CPU metric: // narrow event { timestamp: "2022-06-05T14:44", "hostname": "a", "system.cpu.time": 192877 } A wide event that’s a structured log: // wide event {"Timestamp":"2022-07-01T19:23:50Z","cache_status":"HIT","client_ip_hash":"5c022873f02aac526c40013c12cd87c05745d82cd5dcebc74a0f307670f0b9f2","content_type":"binary/octet-stream","downloaded_gem_name":"log-output-apm_metrics","downloaded_gem_version":"2.0.1","geo_city":"ashburn","geo_country_code":"US","host":"rubygems.org","is_h2":false,"is_ipv6":false,"is_tls":true,"log_resp_body_size":3.9880235619286597,"log_time_elapsed":3.141763230275788,"protocol":"HTTP/1.1","req_body_size":0,"req_header_size":174,"request":"GET","request_accept_charset":"","request_accept_content":"text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2","request_accept_language":"","request_referer":"","request_user_agent":"Java/1.8.0_332","resp_body_size":9728,"resp_header_size":755,"server_datacenter":"IAD","service_id":"rubygems.org","status":"200","time_elapsed":1386,"url":"/gems/log-output-apm_metrics-2.0.1.gem","user_agent_name":"Java"}
• What is an event when it comes to trace data?
  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: <b>// trace span</b> <b>{"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"}</b>
• How do I see how many events I’m currently sending to Honeycomb?
  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.
• When does the counter start on my monthly events limit?
  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).
• What happens when I am over my monthly event limit?
  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.
• What happens if I unexpectedly have a spike in traffic?
  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.
• Are there limits on event size?
  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.

• I backloaded some old data into Honeycomb to do analysis. How long will it be available?
  Our data retention logic is based on time of ingest, so it will be there for 60 days from the date you sent it to Honeycomb (regardless of what’s on the timestamp of the events).
• Is it possible to set my data retention period beyond 60 days for a dataset?
  If you have an Enterprise plan and need more than 60 days of retention, we can work with you to customize your plan. Please contact your Honeycomb sales rep directly for more details.

Enterprise Plans