Honeycomb
Production observability for distributed services and AI workflows, with trace-led debugging and a permanent Free plan.
Honeycomb observability platform introduction
About Honeycomb
Honeycomb helps engineering teams investigate production behavior through distributed traces, metrics, and other telemetry in one query workflow. OpenTelemetry support eases instrumentation, while BubbleUp helps isolate attributes associated with unusual behavior. For AI agents and LLM applications, teams can trace decisions, tool calls, handoffs, token cost, and long-running workflows instead of relying on service health alone. During cloud migrations, the same investigation model can expose outliers, affected users, and regressions as infrastructure changes. The Free plan is permanent and covers up to 20 million events plus 100 million metrics data points each month. Pro starts at $150 per month, raises those limits, and adds SLOs, SSO, and support. Enterprise pricing is custom, with larger starting allocations, APIs, AWS PrivateLink, onboarding, and private cloud support. Volume is the practical dividing line: growing teams may need Pro, and advanced controls or private deployment require Enterprise.
Best for
Best use cases
Investigate an intermittent production failure by querying traces and using BubbleUp to isolate the attributes tied to the outlier.
Trace a multi-step AI agent workflow to locate a failed tool call, costly token path, or problematic handoff.
Monitor a cloud migration in production and identify affected users or regressions before they spread.
Compare before choosing
The permanent Free tier is useful for production evaluation, but its 20M monthly event limit is far below the Pro allowance.
Pro adds SLOs, SSO, more Triggers, and support, while Enterprise adds APIs, PrivateLink, onboarding, and private-cloud support.
Honeycomb centers investigation on high-cardinality telemetry and traces, which suits debugging workflows more than a simple uptime-only monitor.
Features
Debug distributed production systems
Follow traces across distributed services, query unified telemetry, and use BubbleUp to isolate the attributes associated with unusual production behavior.
Observe AI agents and LLM applications
Trace agent decisions, tool calls, handoffs, token cost, and long-running workflows so teams can investigate unpredictable production failures.
Reduce risk during cloud migrations
Use fast feedback and production investigations to surface outliers, identify affected users, and diagnose regressions while infrastructure changes are underway.
Pros
- The permanent Free plan includes 20M monthly events, 100M metrics data points, tracing, and OpenTelemetry support.
- Fast telemetry queries and BubbleUp support detailed production investigation across distributed services.
- Pro and Enterprise add SLOs, SSO, APIs, support, onboarding, PrivateLink, and private-cloud options as needs grow.
Cons
- The Free plan caps usage at 20M events and 100M metrics data points per month, so growing workloads may require Pro.
- Pro starts at $150 per month, creating a clear cost step once a team exceeds Free limits or needs SLOs and SSO.
- Service Map, Query Data API, AWS PrivateLink, extensive SLO capacity, and private-cloud support require Enterprise.
Pricing Plans
Free
- Up to 20M events per month
- Up to 100M metrics data points per month
- 2 Triggers
- Distributed Tracing
- BubbleUp
- OpenTelemetry Support
- Team Query History
- Query Result Permalinks
- Honeycomb Metrics
- Canvas AI Copilot
- Honeycomb MCP
Pro
- All Free plan features
- Up to 750M events per month
- Up to 3.75B metrics data points per month
- 100 Triggers
- 2 Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
- Single Sign-On (SSO)
- Honeycomb Support
- Monthly or annual subscription
Enterprise
- All Pro plan features
- Variable event volume
- Variable metrics data points
- Starts with 300 Triggers
- Starts with 100 SLOs
- Service Map
- Enterprise Support for Refinery
- Enterprise-grade support and onboarding
- Query Data API
- AWS PrivateLink
- SLO Reporting API
- Support for Honeycomb Private Cloud
* Pricing information is for reference only. Please refer to the latest announcement on Honeycomb's official website.