I received information from your team regarding a peer review of Honeycomb Enterprise. As an observability engineer using Honeycomb Enterprise extensively, I can provide substantial input. My primary tasks involve OpenTelemetry, where I send numerous traces and metrics to Honeycomb Enterprise and use it for visualizations of how our code is functioning and how data moves through our systems.
We have identified many problems using Honeycomb Enterprise, such as delays in the system where latency is observed by Honeycomb Enterprise traces, which we then investigate further and resolve. We have our SLA and SLOs configured on Honeycomb Enterprise, allowing us to monitor our reliability score. Additionally, we send many metrics to the platform. In my previous organization, we used it only for traces, but in my current organization, I use it extensively for traces, metrics, SLA, and SLO work. We also use Signoz for infrastructure-related APM metrics and other things, but we cannot use it for Honeycomb Enterprise capabilities.
Honeycomb Enterprise has genuinely helped us. We are not using Honeybee command line, which is a native solution by Honeycomb Enterprise. Instead, we use OpenTelemetry so that we can switch vendors easily. Our complete codebase now has proper telemetry data sending into Honeycomb Enterprise.
We have provided traces for each of the functions we are using. If we need more in-depth insights into what happens inside the code, we set up additional telemetry data points in the code. When you set those telemetry data points there in the code, you send those traces to Honeycomb Enterprise and then we can examine them.
In terms of customer usage, observing how customers are using our solution is very helpful in debugging aspects and also helpful in cost prioritization aspects. If a customer is not using our solution extensively, we can scale it down a bit in terms of servers where our solution is running. This has given us a better approach, particularly for Lambdas where Lambdas are deployed, and we can save considerable costs.
If traffic is not very high and we are able to see metrics where traces are not falling a lot, we can scale down our instances and save our AWS billing. If there is a sudden spike, we can get that monitored via the SLI and SLOs that I have configured. If there are sudden errors, I can scale the instance up.
If there is a genuine bug in the code, Honeycomb Enterprise is very useful for debugging the issues. Even a data-driven issue can be fixed using it because we get all the data when a user is providing any request. We actually get the input data in Honeycomb Enterprise and that way we can solve it very fast by seeing what query they hit or what workflow they have done.