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Frontend

Introducing Native Mobile Support in Honeycomb for Frontend Observability

May 19, 2025

Elsie Phillips

Introducing Native Mobile Support in Honeycomb for Frontend Observability

You shipped your latest release. You tested it on emulators, QA devices, and the latest OS versions. But now it’s live and running on thousands or millions of real devices, across a jungle of screen sizes, hardware specs, OS versions, and network conditions. A user reports a crash on an old Samsung device over 3G. Someone else complains the app feels “sluggish” after updating. You dig through logs. Rebuild test cases. Ping the backend team. Try to reproduce. Yet, still no answers.

Understanding Your App’s Health With Core Mobile Vitals

May 15, 2025

Bee Klimt

Understanding Your App’s Health With Core Mobile Vitals

There are certain important metrics that every mobile app has in common. At Honeycomb, we have surveyed these metrics across iOS and Android, and have defined a set of Core Mobile Vitals we think every app developer should care about. The purpose of these vitals is similar to that of Core Web Vitals for web frontends.

Visualizing Session Flow With Honeycomb

May 6, 2025

Ken Rimple

Visualizing Session Flow With Honeycomb

I want to know what users are doing in my application. A distributed trace is the best way to show the data flow of one user interaction through my application, but it isn’t sufficient to show the overall user experience.

New Feature: Manage Your session.id in Honeycomb’s Web SDK

April 22, 2025

Ken Rimple

New Feature: Manage Your session.id in Honeycomb’s Web SDK

The session.id field is special in Honeycomb for Frontend Observability. It’s a default option for filtering and grouping, and it’s the basis for session timeline analysis (in Early Access). Now you can control how session.id is set.

Wiring Up a Next.js Self-Hosted Application to Honeycomb

February 17, 2025

Ken Rimple

Wiring Up a Next.js Self-Hosted Application to Honeycomb

This blog post will get you started ingesting your Next.js application’s telemetry into Honeycomb. I’ll show you the configuration steps, how to view your traces in Honeycomb, and even how to explore your frontend React telemetry with our Frontend Observability Web Launchpad.

Frontend Monitoring: Deliver Seamless and Performant User Experiences

February 6, 2025

Rox Williams

Frontend Monitoring: Deliver Seamless and Performant User Experiences

In this blog, we’ll share the fundamentals of frontend monitoring, including what you need to know about performance measurement and strategies for staying ahead of monitoring challenges to deliver high-performing, user-centric applications.

Configuring a React Application with Honeycomb For Frontend Observability

January 23, 2025

Ken Rimple

Configuring a React Application with Honeycomb For Frontend Observability

In this article, I’ll lay out approaches for wiring Honeycomb to client-side only React so you can ingest your telemetry into Honeycomb and take advantage of the Web Launchpad. This telemetry sends semantically-named attributes, and can be used with any OTLP destination.

Implementing High-Cardinality Instrumentation in Frontend Apps

January 16, 2025

Winston Hearn

Implementing High-Cardinality Instrumentation in Frontend Apps

In speaking with frontend engineers this past year, I realized that understanding the power of wide events is a big mental shift. We’re used to having metrics—think the P70 of your Core Web Vitals, or the average Time To First Byte (TTFB). These are high-level numbers that give us some insight into the average user experience on your apps—but wide events help us do so much more than metrics can ever dream of.

Troubleshooting CORS Errors in Offsite API Calls

December 19, 2024

Ken Rimple

Troubleshooting CORS Errors in Offsite API Calls

In this article, I’ll clear up the confusion around Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), specifically discussing preflight requests, which are the bane of engineers everywhere.

Frontend Observability: A Candid Conversation With Emily Nakashima and Charity Majors

October 10, 2024

Elsie Phillips

Frontend Observability: A Candid Conversation With Emily Nakashima and Charity Majors

Frontend development has evolved rapidly over the past decade, but one challenge remains constant: understanding what’s happening in real-time across diverse browsers, environments, and user interactions. This is where observability steps in—but how does it apply to the frontend world where user experience can break in countless, unexpected ways?

Teams & Collaboration

How_We_Compare_to_Other_FEO_Tools_featured_image

October 8, 2024

Fahim Zaman

Redefining RUM: A Comparative Gap Analysis of Existing Tools

Real user monitoring (RUM) began as a straightforward approach to tracking basic web performance metrics. Focused on things like page load times and response rates, RUM relied on server-side logging and simple browser timings. While these tools captured Core Web Vitals (CWVs), they offered limited insights into how users actually interacted with pages, focused mainly on server-side performance.

Using Honeycomb for Frontend Observability to Improve Honeycomb

October 2, 2024

Winston Hearn

Using Honeycomb for Frontend Observability to Improve Honeycomb

Recently, we announced the launch of Honeycomb for Frontend Observability, our new solution that helps frontend developers move from traditional monitoring to observability. What this means in practice is that frontend developers are no longer limited to a metrics view of their app that can only be disaggregated in a few dimensions. Now, they can enjoy the full power of observability, where their app collects a broad set of data as traces to enable much richer analysis of the state of a web service.

Beyond Backend: Honeycomb for Frontend Observability is Now GA

September 24, 2024

Winston Hearn

Beyond Backend: Honeycomb for Frontend Observability is Now GA

Observability has traditionally been backend-focused, but the frontend is just as hard—if not harder—to debug and has simply outgrown current monitoring tools. Engineers working with the frontend need the ability to see every user interaction with their system—and all the rich context around it. They need observability for the frontend. Today, we’re proud to announce that Honeycomb for Frontend Observability is now generally available.

News & Announcements

Product Updates

Debugging INP With Honeycomb for Frontend Observability

September 23, 2024

Winston Hearn

Debugging INP With Honeycomb for Frontend Observability

In this post, I’m going to walk through how you can use Honeycomb for Frontend Observability to debug INP, which was just promoted to a stable Core Web Vital in March. The Honeycomb-specific steps in this post are applicable to debugging CLS and LCP as well, and Honeycomb’s instrumentation package captures attribution data for all three metrics.

Understanding OpenTelemetry’s Browser Instrumentation

May 7, 2024

Winston Hearn

Understanding OpenTelemetry’s Browser Instrumentation

Recently, Honeycomb released a Web Instrumentation package built around the OpenTelemetry browser JS packages. In this post, I’ll go over what the OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation package gives you, and what Honeycomb’s distribution adds in order to give you even more insight into your web services.

Instrumentation

Introducing Honeycomb for Frontend Observability

May 2, 2024

Winston Hearn

Introducing Honeycomb for Frontend Observability: Get the Data You Need for Actionable Customer Experience Improvements

Honeycomb for Frontend Observability gives frontend developers the ability to quickly identify opportunities for optimization within their web app. This starts with better OpenTelemetry instrumentation, available as an NPM package, that lets you instrument and collect attribution data on Core Web Vitals in under an hour.

Product Updates

Real User Monitoring With a Splash of OpenTelemetry

April 17, 2024

Austin Parker

Real User Monitoring With a Splash of OpenTelemetry

You’re probably familiar with the concept of real user monitoring (RUM) and how it’s used to monitor websites or mobile applications. If not, here’s the short version: RUM requires telemetry data, which is generated by an SDK that you import into your web or mobile application. These SDKs then hook into the JS runtime, the browser itself, or various system APIs in order to measure performance. These SDKs are usually pretty optimized for both speed and size—you don’t want the dependency that tells you how fast or slow your application is to impact your application speed, after all.

Observing Core Web Vitals with OpenTelemetry: Part Two

April 4, 2024

Purvi Kanal

Observing Core Web Vitals with OpenTelemetry: Part Two

In a previous blog post, we outlined how to set up our own auto-instrumentation to send Core Web Vitals data to Honeycomb. We recently released a beta version of an OpenTelemetry wrapper to send traces from the browser to Honeycomb.

Frontend Debugging Is Bad and it Should Feel Bad

March 28, 2024

Winston Hearn

Frontend Debugging Is Bad and it Should Feel Bad

There’s a sentence that strikes fear into the heart of every frontend developer I’ve ever met: Users are reporting issues, and we don’t know how to replicate them. What do you do when that happens? Do you cry? Do you mark the issue as wontfix and move on? Personally, I took the road less traveled: gave up frontend engineering and moved into product management (this is not actually accurate but it’s a good joke and it feels truthy).

A Practical Guide to Debugging Browser Performance With OpenTelemetry

December 1, 2023

Purvi Kanal

A Practical Guide to Debugging Browser Performance With OpenTelemetry

So you’ve taken a look at the core web vitals for your site and… it’s not looking good. You’re overwhelmed, and you don’t know what change to make because everything seems like too big of a project to make a real difference. There are so many measurements to keep track of and the standards cited seem even scarier. This is extremely normal. Web performance standards can feel impossible to meet for a lot of us.