Speak with our experts to learn more about Honeycomb for Frontend Observability.
For years, Fender Musical Instruments has been synonymous with iconic guitars and amplifiers. But in recent years, the company has expanded its legacy into the digital realm, offering tools like Fender Play, an innovative learning platform for aspiring musicians.
Behind this digital evolution lies a focus on delivering exceptional user experiences for its consumer-facing applications—a mission supported by Honeycomb for Frontend Observability.
We recently caught up with Michael Garski, Director of Platform Engineering at Fender, to hear how things are going with their frontend developers and how Honeycomb continues to shape their observability strategy.
Why frontend observability matters
For Fender, delivering a seamless digital experience is as vital as crafting world-class instruments. As more customers engage with Fender Play and other digital platforms, understanding how applications perform on the frontend—where users directly interact—has become essential. Yet, like many teams, Fender’s engineers initially relied on traditional tools to monitor frontend performance. While these tools offered some insights, they only provided aggregate metrics, which created gaps in Fender’s understanding of individual user experiences.
“We couldn’t look at specific requests or drill down into the granular details of a user’s experience. This limitation made it difficult to diagnose issues quickly or to understand how third-party services were impacting performance. Additionally, tests that ran only once a day failed to capture real-time insights, which prevented us from seeing the dynamic, day-to-day fluctuations,” explained Michael.
Recognizing the limitations of their existing tools, Fender’s team realized they needed a solution that would advance their frontend observability capabilities—one that could deliver granular, actionable insights into every user’s experience.
Having already used Honeycomb to monitor backend systems, Fender’s engineering team was excited to try Honeycomb for Frontend Observability. “We’d had such a positive experience with Honeycomb’s observability for our backend systems. When Honeycomb announced their frontend observability product, it was a natural choice,” shared Michael.
Honeycomb for Frontend Observability offered precisely what the team needed: the ability to drill down into specific requests and uncover outliers often hidden in aggregate metrics. For instance, by tagging traces with user IDs, engineers could now investigate individual user journeys, identifying and resolving issues that were previously invisible.
A unified approach to observability
One of the standout features for Fender is that Honeycomb is a unified platform for both backend and frontend observability. This cohesive approach simplifies workflows and eliminates the need for engineers to learn and manage multiple tools. “Honeycomb’s unified system for frontend and backend observability means we don’t have to juggle multiple platforms. Once we understand how to use it, we get full observability into everything we need, which makes it easier for our team to operate efficiently,” Michael explained.
The team’s adoption of Honeycomb also introduced a new level of collaboration. By linking frontend traces to backend systems, they gained a holistic view of their applications, identifying not only client-side issues, but also pinpointing the root causes in backend or third-party services.
Honeycomb for Frontend Observability is built on OpenTelemetry, an open standard for collecting telemetry data like logs, metrics, and traces. “OpenTelemetry generates high-quality, flexible telemetry data while Honeycomb’s native support for it made the two a winning combination. The instrumentation process was really straightforward thanks to Honeycomb’s SDK, and the platform has made adding custom attributes and metadata a breeze,” said Michael.
Delighting customers with exceptional user experience
One of the most significant benefits of Honeycomb for Fender’s frontend development team is its ability to uncover outliers in performance, giving the team the visibility they need to quickly identify and resolve issues that could impact the user experience. Michael shared, “With Honeycomb, we can dig into outliers, figure out what’s behind any slowdowns, and fix them right away. It gives us the clarity we need to quickly spot issues and fine-tune performance, so everything runs smoother.”
Honeycomb for Frontend Observability has empowered Fender’s team to significantly enhance the customer experience. With the ability to quickly identify and resolve issues, the team has delivered a more seamless and responsive interface, delighting customers with faster, smoother interactions. By honing in on metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)—a key indicator of webpage loading speed—they’ve fine-tuned performance, ensuring pages load quickly and users can dive into their experience without delay.
“Thanks to the insights we get from Honeycomb, we can stay ahead of the curve and make proactive improvements. It’s completely changed how we uncover hidden inefficiencies and has helped us deliver a more reliable, high-performing experience for our users,” explained Michael.
Fender currently uses Honeycomb for Frontend Observability to monitor its ecommerce platforms, and the success of this implementation has sparked plans to expand its use to Fender Play and other consumer-facing applications.
Michael’s passion for Honeycomb was evident as he described its impact. “The risk of not using a tool like Honeycomb is just not knowing what’s happening,” he explained. “Understanding what your customers are experiencing on the frontend is absolutely essential for delivering the best experience possible.”
Fender’s experience with Honeycomb has been overwhelmingly positive, thanks in part to the vendor’s exceptional support team. Michael explained, “Honeycomb has been incredibly responsive and helpful, guiding us through everything from setting the proper sampling rates to following best practices.”
Empowering Fender’s next chapter
As Fender continues to evolve its digital platforms, Honeycomb remains a cornerstone of their observability strategy. By expanding their use of Honeycomb’s frontend observability across all consumer-facing applications, Fender is doubling down on its commitment to delivering world-class user experiences—whether customers are shopping for a guitar or learning to play one.
Michael summed it up best: “Honeycomb is the one vendor I always recommend for observability needs. They’ve been an incredible partner in helping us provide the best experiences for our customers.”
At a glance
About
An American icon, Fender was founded in 1946 and has established a global influence that extends from the studio to the stage—and beyond. Everyone from beginners to the world’s most acclaimed artists have used Fender instruments, amps and gear, making the company not only a revered industry leader but a cultural symbol that resonates globally.
Industry
Music instruments
Products
Honeycomb platform
Use cases
Frontend development
Platform engineering and debugging
Application performance monitoring
Results
- Improved visibility into individual user experiences
- Optimized frontend performance for end users
- Streamlined development operations through unified observability
- Enabled faster issue identification and resolution
- Streamlined workflows with full-stack observability
