Join us as we hit the road: Secure your spot at Honeycomb's premier roadshow!

Consolidate your logs and metrics workflows into one tool with distributed tracing

Other vendors treat traces as a discrete complement to logs and metrics. Honeycomb’s approach is different: wide events make it possible to rely on Honeycomb’s traces as your only debugging tool, consolidating logs and metrics use cases into one workflow.

Honeycomb’s traces stitch events together to illuminate what happened within the flow of system interactions. Unlike metrics, which provide indirect signals about user experience, tracing in Honeycomb models how your users actually interact with your system, surfacing relevant events by comparing across all columns.

By combining traces with BubbleUp, our anomaly detection tool, Honeycomb automatically compares every attribute on millions of requests to show you exactly which traces are tied to bad user experiences. So instead of combing through individual traces looking for patterns, Honeycomb saves your team time by pinpointing the exact combination of factors that lead to application problems.

Honeycomb’s distributed tracing has massive advantages over metrics and other monitoring tools.

The transactions are encoded with deep information resulting in multiple visualizations that you can seamlessly switch between to get alternative perspectives on the problem and hone in on the patterns.

Kesha Mykhailov

Senior Product Engineer

Great tracing starts with great telemetry data

Honeycomb supports and contributes to OpenTelemetry, a vendor-agnostic observability framework that enables teams to instrument, collect, and export rich telemetry data. Or, if you have already instrumented your code, you can use the Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Collector or review our documentation to utilize distributed tracing without making any changes to your instrumentation.