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Since its inception in 2004, Lansweeper has been at the forefront of helping businesses understand, manage, and protect their IT devices and networks through a powerful IT asset management platform. As the platform grew from an on-premises solution to a cloud-based SaaS offering, Lansweeper expanded its reach to a global, multi-region customer base. With this growth came the inevitable challenges of scaling observability and ensuring the engineering team could maintain performance and reliability across regions.
The company needed an observability solution that could scale seamlessly with their infrastructure and provide insights into performance, latency, and errors. Lansweeper leveraged OpenTelemetry to collect and process telemetry data, and, as a top requirement for their selection, they wanted an observability platform that natively supported OpenTelemetry while offering deep insights into their distributed system and application performance.
To address their needs, Lansweeper ultimately chose Honeycomb, recognizing it as the ideal solution to meet their complex observability needs and enhance their engineering capabilities.
Realizing proactive observability
Honeycomb was the catalyst for Lansweeper’s engineering transformation to unlock real-time, deep insights that elevated their team’s capabilities. With Honeycomb, Lansweeper’s engineers seamlessly track and analyze request flows across their system, which operates in three AWS accounts in two regions, each with multiple Kubernetes clusters and a total of 350 microservices. By harnessing distributed tracing, the team can rapidly pinpoint performance bottlenecks and resolve errors with laser precision.
The platform’s real-time performance monitoring gives engineers instant visibility into system behavior, empowering them to embrace proactive observability. This shift means catching issues before customers even notice. One standout example of this success is API health; for Lansweeper, reliable APIs are the backbone of their product’s usability. A well-functioning API ensures that Lansweeper customers can efficiently track their IT inventory and access critical information without a hitch.
“In the past, I didn’t have a clear idea of how my APIs were really performing. We had dashboards, but those were checked sporadically or only when something broke. Metrics like median latency and error rates weren’t consistently tracked or easily queryable. With Honeycomb, it’s instantly clear when something’s slow with an API or throwing errors—it plays a crucial role in helping us manage API health,” said Jeroen Savat, Senior Platform Engineer at Lansweeper. This newfound clarity allowed the team to rapidly identify and address potential issues, ensuring that their APIs consistently deliver the performance users expect and deserve.
And this shift in capabilities—from reactive monitoring to proactive observability—was a gamechanger for the team. Jeroen noted, “With Honeycomb, we now have observability to drive continuous improvements. Good observability can almost ‘gamify’ development—it pushes us to continually improve the performance, reliability, and overall experience of what we’re building.”
Empowering multi-region management
Expanding into multi-region environments presented unique engineering challenges for Lansweeper. As the company scaled its cloud-based IT asset management platform, it had to manage multiple clusters across diverse geographical locations—each with its own distinct behaviors and potential failure points. Honeycomb’s ability to seamlessly support multi-region architecture has been transformative for Lansweeper, empowering the engineering team to ensure operational integrity.
“As we launched the new AWS region, we were still in the process of getting the Collectors in place to capture the regional data into Honeycomb. This transitional phase highlighted how critical observability is to our operations. We didn’t have metrics, logs, or traces—basically, we were flying blind. The moment we turned Honeycomb on for that region, the team breathed a sigh of relief,” said Jeroen.
The ability to filter data by region using OpenTelemetry Collectors has been particularly helpful. “With Honeycomb and OpenTelemetry, I can add a region attribute to the telemetry data, which allows us to focus on specific areas—whether it’s the U.S. or Europe. This kind of dimensionality makes multi-region management so much easier, streamlining our operations and ensuring we can maintain performance standards across all locations,” explained Jeroen.
Jeroen is particularly pleased with how Honeycomb helps Lansweeper manage costs in a multi-region setup. He emphasized, “I’m not worried about our observability costs ballooning as we add more regions. Honeycomb’s approach—especially with sampling and efficient trace collection—ensures that even as we grow, we’re not facing a logarithmic increase in expenses. We’re not just managing one region anymore; we’re managing three. The ability to handle this complexity consistently across regions means that the value we derive from observability increases exponentially. It’s all about scaling the value.”
Gaining a human-centric partnership
As Lansweeper drove innovation and growth, Honeycomb played a pivotal role in their engineering strategy. Jeroen underscored how Honeycomb has been instrumental in empowering the team to achieve engineering excellence: “Honeycomb helps us get closer to the ideal of engineering excellence. Of course, that’s a continuous journey, but it’s about knowing when something is broken before the customer feels the impact. Honeycomb is always our go-to for first-line debugging—it’s the fastest way for us to pinpoint what’s wrong.“
Beyond the technical benefits, Lansweeper’s relationship with Honeycomb has been a vital component of their success. “Honeycomb isn’t just another vendor to us. They treat us like humans. Whenever we hit a roadblock, I can reach out, and they’re always ready to jump on a call to help us figure it out,” Jeroen noted.
Jeroen recalled several instances where Honeycomb’s team provided invaluable support. “Martin helped us debug some older C# applications, and Mike was instrumental in helping us set up Honeycomb Refinery for our multi-region deployment. They’re not just experts in the product—they understand the unique challenges we face, and they’re willing to work with us to overcome them.”
This level of partnership has been critical for Lansweeper, particularly during the more challenging phases of their multi-region expansion. Jeroen shared, “We had an issue with legacy systems during our multi-region setup, and the Honeycomb team was right there with us, helping us navigate both old and new environments. That kind of support makes all the difference.”
With Honeycomb in place, Lansweeper now has a fully scalable observability stack that can grow alongside their platform. “I have no fear of things breaking without us knowing,” Jeroen said. “Before Honeycomb, I didn’t always have a clear understanding of how all the pieces fit together—whether it was the collectors, the metrics, or the traces. Now, I know exactly how everything flows, and that gives me a lot of confidence.”
As Lansweeper continues to innovate, Honeycomb remains a core part of their observability strategy. “The value of Honeycomb scales with us,” said Jeroen. “We’re managing an enterprise SaaS platform across regions, and the ability to keep everything running smoothly with the same level of insight and control is huge.”
For Lansweeper, the combination of Honeycomb’s product, its support team, and the seamless integration with OpenTelemetry has made it the ideal solution for their needs. “Honeycomb makes multi-region easy,” Jeroen said. “It abstracts away the complexity and lets us focus on what really matters—delivering an excellent product to our customers, no matter where they are.“
Final thoughts
Lansweeper’s journey to multi-region observability highlights the importance of having the right tools in place to manage complexity and scale. Honeycomb, with its deep integration with OpenTelemetry, has not only supported Lansweeper’s technical needs but also provided a level of partnership that has helped the engineering team navigate the challenges of rapid growth.
For CTOs and engineering leaders, Lansweeper’s story is a testament to the power of proactive observability and the value of having a partner that’s as committed to your success as you are. “Honeycomb has been essential to our growth. It’s the tool we depend on to drive engineering excellence, and it’s the partner we trust to help us solve the tough problems along the way,” concluded Jeroen.
At a glance
About
Founded in 2004, Lansweeper is an IT Asset Management platform provider helping businesses better understand, manage and protect their IT devices and network. Lansweeper helps customers minimize risks and optimize their IT assets by providing actionable insight into their technology assets at all times, offering trustworthy, valuable, and accurate insights about the state of users, devices, and software.
Industry
Software
Products
Honeycomb platform
Use cases
Multi-region SaaS management
Real-time performance monitoring
Incident debugging
Results
- Achieved mission-critical visibility for multi-region SaaS management
- Saved 100 engineering hours per week on debugging
- Fostered engineering excellence through proactive issue identification
- Improved API reliability and performance through enhanced observability
- Gained cost-effective observability with value that scales
- Confidently launched into new AWS region by leveraging observability during the transition
