Distributed Tracing
Trace Across Distributed Services
Distributed tracing brings the benefit of being able to inspect a production issue across your services and narrow in on what’s happening. Tracing views generate vast spans that can be overwhelming with other tools.
Honeycomb’s built-in distributed tracing capabilities are designed to let users efficiently navigate the full breadth of tracing data with easy switching views, so you spot errors and latencies without missing crucial details that help resolve issues.
See how it works
Analyze Your Distributed Tracing Data Faster
Simply put, Honeycomb gives you an easy-to-use distributed tracing solution for monitoring microservices. Features include a full-text search over trace spans and toggle to collapse and expand sections of trace waterfalls. With a waterfall view, quickly diagnose bottlenecks, optimize performance, and understand how your system is processing service requests. Easily switch views to see the time and resources taken to service any request visualized in different interactive charts, such as histograms and heatmaps.
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“Before Honeycomb, we couldn't really observe what was going on across the entire system. Honeycomb Tracing makes everything transparent again.”
Read the case study (no login)White Paper: Distributed Tracing - A Guide for Microservices and More
At Honeycomb, we believe that distributed tracing doesn’t have to be an exercise in frustration. That’s why we’ve made this guide for the rest of us to democratize tracing for microservices and more.
Distributed Tracing Paper
Distributed Tracing Topic Highlights from Our Blog

What Exactly is Going On
Tracing is an understanding tool as much as a debugging tool; a way for code authors to communicate the structure of their code. With waterfall views you don’t have to be an expert to tell if fetching results was the bottleneck or persisting results.
Trace the path
Go Deep Without Getting Lost
Comparing diagrams is a useful way to get a quick overview of a trace. At a glance, see if most traces are doing the same work, or if something is behaving differently.

No Switching Between Tools
Click on spans and take a look at the metadata. See the value of adding extra fields to spans and understand call requests and if any use 3rd party services. Switch between query result views and tracing to more deeply diagnose.