Getting Started With Honeycomb Metrics

Introduction

Honeycomb is an event-based observability tool. Many Honeycomb customers use metrics along with their events, but the recommended usage and implementation choices in the product can be a bit disorienting to users new to observability. Honeycomb Metrics is not designed to work like traditional metrics tools; instead, Honeycomb takes a new approach to using metrics that’s compatible with modern observability-based debugging workflows.

Events and metrics are fundamentally different data types. Typically, that distinction keeps these data types living in different tools and data sets. The power of observability is being able to holistically understand both your applications and your systems without having to switch contexts—using different tools to analyze different parts of your stack is a relic of historical implementation details. Because events, as a data type, are better suited to debug issues at the application level, there are a few considerations to keep in mind if you’re migrating to observability from a more traditional world where application-level metrics help with most of your debugging. Metrics particularly shine for understanding system-level issues—the role for which they were invented. A common pattern when shifting to observability from traditional monitoring and APM workflows is that your reliance on metrics to find application issues typically diminishes while your reliance on them to surface system issues remains constant.

Honeycomb Metrics allows you to send metrics data to Honeycomb in their native format. Currently, that feature is only available to Enterprise customers. Non-enterprise customers can still send metrics into Honeycomb, but will need to convert metrics data into event data before doing so.

This whitepaper shows you how to use metrics with Honeycomb, both with and without the Enterprise metrics feature. First, it examines the role of metrics, how they’re used today, and how their usage should change when used in tandem with observability tools. It then briefly covers using Honeycomb Metrics to implement that change. For users without Honeycomb Metrics, this paper presents practical examples of which metrics to collect and includes code samples that show you how to manually send them to Honeycomb. Finally, this paper covers practices necessary to analyze metrics in an event-based context, along with tips to help ensure you can properly compare the two when manually sending us your metrics. When migrating toward observability from a metrics world, you will likely wind up replacing 95% of your metrics with Honeycomb events and keep the last 5% for use cases that are still best suited to metrics in today’s modern systems. This whitepaper shows you how.