Overview

Honeycomb are a company with a radically different notion about observability practice. They do not believe that observability can be reduced to the classic three pillars of Metrics, Logs and traces. In the Honeycomb world the fundamental unit of observability is an "event". This is an arbitrarily wide and schema-less data structure.

The purpose of the "event" is to provide all the necessary context for a process within a single entity. This is radically different to the model of dividing telemetry into different streams which then need to be correlated. In the Honeycomb model, all relevant data points are combined into a single event which can then be analysed along an arbitrary number of dimensions.

A Honeycomb event can potentially equate to an individual log or an individual span or an individual metric, it can also be a single entity that combines all of these - as well as an arbitrary number of additional attributes. If you wanted to get a rough guide to the amount of events that your system would generate you can aggregate your current totals of log, span and metrics records. If you are not sure how to go about this, just get in touch and we will be happy to help.