Turning Log Chaos Into Clarity
Logs. They’re everywhere—generated at massive volumes by your systems and software—yet, often underutilized. For many engineers, logs are a necessary evil: dense, scattered data that slows down debugging, interrupts workflows, and adds unnecessary complexity. Engineering teams can end up feeling overwhelmed as they navigate a sea of logs with no end in sight, juggling disconnected tools and facing mounting costs.
But what if logging didn’t have to be this hard?
Imagine transforming your logs from an unruly digital junk drawer into an indispensable tool for insight, speed, and collaboration. That’s what Honeycomb delivers: a fresh approach to observability that unifies your telemetry data and empowers your team to act faster and smarter.
You can effortlessly onboard essential logs for in-depth analysis, quickly identify anomalies, and connect technical data to business outcomes. With clear and transparent pricing, real-time insights, and quick onboarding, Honeycomb puts you in the driver’s seat of your data journey.
In this guide, we’ll dive into the stories of three Honeycomb customers who struggled with logging challenges and how they turned things around. You’ll see how Honeycomb helped them streamline workflows, cut through the noise, and take control of their data. By unlocking the full potential of their logs, they were able to eliminate inefficiencies and drive real, impactful change.
Logs got you down?
Every engineering team has logs, but they often feel more like an avalanche than a helpful tool. Let’s break down four common log-related headaches that keep engineers up at night.
Logging everything, yet gaining little
Most logging solutions bombard you with data—endless streams of information that are tough to decipher. As log volumes increase, so do costs, making it difficult to justify the expense when the value isn’t proportional to what you’re spending. Engineers need to focus on quality insights, not noise.
Complex tools and slower workflows
Juggling logs, traces, and metrics across different tools feels like herding cats. Each tool demands its own setup, integrations, and maintenance—turning smooth workflows into a tangled mess of silos. The result? More friction and slower troubleshooting—all thanks to tool sprawl.
Slow debugging
Debugging is hard enough without sluggish log query performance slowing you down even more. When your team is under pressure to resolve issues, every minute counts. Yet traditional tools often struggle to deliver real-time results, leaving engineers waiting.
Paying too much for redundant data
Storing the same data across multiple platforms is an expensive, inefficient practice. Teams end up paying for redundant telemetry storage in logs, metrics, and traces, making their workflows slower and more costly.
These challenges might sound all too familiar, but they don’t have to be your reality. Let’s explore how three forward-thinking engineering teams tackled these very issues and transformed their logging experience with Honeycomb.
Amperity levels up to unified observability and central logging
Situation: Amperity’s observability depended on a suite of tools for logs, metrics, and dashboards. Managing this array of tools demanded diverse skill sets and a lot of tribal knowledge. Engineers needed a significant investment of time and debugging expertise to gain a contextual understanding of any issue. Plus, the logging tool’s ingest-based pricing model meant that Amperity’s logging would halt—full stop—whenever they exceeded the daily limit.
Solution: Transitioning their logging to Honeycomb was a natural choice: “The most compelling factor was the significant cost savings. With the ability to ingest all our logs previously sent to our former logging solution, we could sunset that contract without any additional cost to our Honeycomb agreement.”
Results: With Amperity’s 80 engineers investigating code issues, they can access a wealth of contextual information with Honeycomb that wasn’t previously available. This capability empowers the team to tackle unknown-unknowns, grasping the root cause of an issue within minutes.
- Consolidated on a unified observability and central logging tool with $0 cost uplift
- Empowered engineers with contextual information for 10x faster issue resolution
“We adopted Honeycomb for Log Analytics to transform our engineering team’s observability, enabling a deeper understanding of the principles behind observability. This includes the capacity to handle arbitrarily wide structured events and perform searches against that data to quickly identify and resolve issues 10X faster with a system that delivers sufficient performance.”
— Josh Parsons, Software Development Engineer II, Amperity
Fender rocks the logs
Situation: When Fender ventured into digital app development, they implemented a centralized log monitoring solution but ran into challenges. The query syntax was cumbersome, and the user interface lacked user-friendliness, making it difficult to search for errors or root causes. Team members resorted to accessing logs directly, bypassing the tool altogether for quicker troubleshooting: “Our investigation workflow was challenging, often requiring the team to spend considerable time—typically half an hour—sifting through broad log queries to find specific entries of interest.”
Solution: Honeycomb has been instrumental in elevating the engineering team’s experience, enhancing efficiency, and boosting satisfaction in Fender’s observability journey. “Honeycomb makes it effortless to understand our code and extract the necessary information. This empowers our team to iterate faster, complete tasks, and avoid the frustration of digging through logs to find that needle in the haystack.”
Results: “Honeycomb has been a gamechanger in transforming our observability practices, serving as our central platform of choice. It makes maintaining our observability a lot easier and helps us truly understand how our applications are performing without spending a lot of time digging into things.”
- Rapid debugging with root cause in a minute
- Gained predictable pricing that eliminated the need for data sampling
“We have predictable pricing that lets us do away with the legacy approach of sampling logs to preserve budget. Honeycomb’s event-based pricing empowers us to see every request from every service that comes through.”
— Michael Garski, Director of Platform Engineering, Fender
Ritchie Bros. shifts from logs
Situation: The accumulation of diverse technologies from numerous acquisitions over the company’s 70-year history shaped a complex monolithic system, compounded by different teams using various tools for observability. Ultimately, it was time to re-architect and migrate to a cloud-native environment based on Kubernetes. This presented a crucial need to enhance observability capabilities in order to ensure a successful digital transformation.
Solution: Previously, Ritchie Bros. observability primarily relied on collecting logs and essentially reconstructing traces through timestamp correlation. With Honeycomb’s unified observability approach, the team now has a comprehensive understanding of the request path for user transactions and has optimized the cost curve of observability by embedding contextual information that was previously only available in logs. With Honeycomb, they enhanced their traces with more detailed information, resulting in pinpoint insights at the team’s fingertips when they need it.
Results: “Honeycomb has been instrumental in elevating our operational excellence, helping us achieve a fast time to understanding (TTU) in seconds or minutes. When our entire team aligns on TTU, we can seamlessly coordinate efforts towards a common outcome. After we release code to address issues, we again rely on Honeycomb to help us observe and validate that it’s working as expected.”
- Elevated engineering performance through modern observability practices
- Transformed troubleshooting experience, reducing TTU from hours to mere seconds
“Honeycomb has transformed how fast and how well we can coordinate across the company where we’re all working from a common point of observability insights—whether we’re troubleshooting or making capital investment decisions.”
— Ranbir Chawla, SVP of Engineering, Ritchie Bros.
Conclusion
At Honeycomb, we’ve witnessed how log management can quickly spiral into an overwhelming tangle of inefficiencies and wasted resources as systems scale. But the good news is: just because your logs have grown into a sprawling mess doesn’t mean you’re destined to wrestle with slow queries and delayed insights. With the right approach and tools, you can transform those log headaches into opportunities for speed and efficiency.
Our customer stories show that overcoming log challenges isn’t about bandaid solutions or simply collecting more data. It’s about centralizing your telemetry, cutting through the noise, and identifying the key signals that drive real improvements. Whether it’s reducing tool sprawl, improving log query performance, or eliminating redundant data storage, Honeycomb helps you make sense of the chaos and get to the insights that matter most.
We’ve walked alongside our customers through their toughest debugging moments, feeling the frustration of bottlenecks and the excitement of fast, meaningful breakthroughs. And we’re here to tell you: you don’t have to go it alone. With Honeycomb, you’ll have a partner who’s just as invested in solving your logging challenges as you are—armed with the expertise and tools to help you debug faster and work smarter every step of the way.
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