Overall experience with
How helpful reviews are selected
Favorable Review
Product: Honeycomb
This is not an observability conversation. It's an engineering culture conversation.
Likes and dislikes about
likes
1. The query engine and the UX are the real differentiators from a user perspective. High cardinality exploration across traces and events lets you ask questions about production that no existing monitoring tools at our disposal can answer. When an incident involves a combination of customer segment, deployment version, and infrastructure region, using the span attribute feature is such a powerful way for teams to correlate the various subsystems across a landscape as complex as ours. None of the existing monitoring tools allow us to enrich tracing data on the fly. This is not an incremental improvement over APM tooling. It's a step change in understanding production systems. 2. OTel-native instrumentation is non-negotiable for us, both ingest and export. We were consolidating a fragmented observability stack across multiple vendors and needed portable instrumentation to support our telemetry pipelines. Honeycombs commitment to OpenTelemetry meant we could invest in instrumentation once and not face re-work if our vendor landscape evolved. In a regulated environment where vendor changes require long procurement cycles, portability is strategic and necessary. 3. Unlike other vendors, the team engaged as a strategic partner, not a product vendor. Honeycombs willingness to discuss engineering culture change and how observability practice actually scales inside large regulated enterprises was unmatched by any vendor conversation I've had at our company on the buyer side. Product leadership engaged directly with our architecture team on strategic questions.
March 25, 2026
dislikes
The dashboarding works fine, but is clunky and generally unpleasant. I prefer the visual and experience of building a dashboard in other products from years ago. Need more flexibility in how I layout the board itself/compactness; unbelievable there isn't already a collapsible row/sections feature. Cloning boards between environments doesn't include text panels, but that's a known limitation. Managing board definitions in code/terrafrom is painful, why can't I just export/import from JSON? Can't create a board that includes an attribute until that attribute has been seen in that environment. The separation of datasets is pretty strict; so combining observability data from different systems basically has to be handled outside the system. Alerting works, but has various limits (how much history can be queried) that make it a little harder to use.
April 29, 2026
This service may contain translations provided by Google. Google disclaims all warranties related to the translations, express or implied, including any warranties of accuracy, reliability, and any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. Gartner's use of this provider is for operational purposes and does not constitute an endorsement of its products or services.