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Honeycomb

Honeycomb is an observability platform built around a high-cardinality, high-dimensionality column store.

Concepts

  • Teams model organisations.
  • Datasets partition stored data, and may model environments. Note that there's no privilege separation between datasets within a team at this time.
  • BubbleUp is the core experience: it surfaces anomalies in dimensions based on a selection made on a histogram.
  • Events are structured representations of actions taking place in a system, e.g. web transactions. Everything in Honeycomb is stored as an event.
    • Columns available will differ with the type of event.
    • Derived Columns allow computing additional values for each event based on that event's other column values.
  • Queries
    • Query results represent point-in-time executions of a query.
  • Triggers enable notification delivery when query results cross configured thresholds.
  • SLOs model expectations of service quality as Service Level Objectives.
    • Burn rate alerts behave similarly to triggers, but are based on the depletion rate of the error budget.

Event ingest

  • Beelines are proprietary SDKs for ingesting data, deprecated in favour of OpenTelemetry.
  • Honeytail ingests log files.

Aggregates

  • COUNT is the number of events
  • COUNT_DISTINCT(column) is the number of unique values - for the given field
  • CONCURRENCY yields the number of matching spans in-progress (as determined by start time and duration) in each time interval.
  • SUM(column)
  • AVG(column)
  • MAX(column)
  • MIN(column)
  • Pnn(column) computes a percentile.
  • RATE_MAX(column), RATE_AVG(column) and RATE_SUM(column) computes the rate of change between time buckets.

Operations

  • =, !=
  • starts-with, does-not-start-with
  • >, >=, <=, <
  • contains, does-not-contain
  • in, not-in comma-delimited, no parentheses

Special fields

  • trace.parent_id, trace.span_id, and trace.trace_id follow the Traces definitions.

API keys

API keys are stored at the team level, and can either be visible to all team members or just administrators.

Permissions:

  • Send Events
  • Create Datasets
  • Manage Queries and Columns
  • Manage Markers
  • Manage Boards
  • Manage Triggers

Recipients

PagerDuty recipients on triggers don't show their integration names, only their IDs, in the API. To find the correct ID to use in an API request to update a trigger, create a temporary trigger via the UI and add the recipient, then look it up via the API.

Children
  1. Schedule
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