Skip to content
KONIGI

Products

Honeycomb

Query-first; heatmaps and BubbleUp replace the dashboard-of-panels model with draw-a-region cross-filtering.

Live public demo both theme Observability

honeycomb.io , opens in a new tab Live demo , opens in a new tab

Patterns seen here 12

Captures

2 captures, newest first. Hover any box for the pattern and the note.

Honeycomb — Trace / cart checkout
Trace waterfall. Indentation is causality, length is duration, horizontal position is when it started. Six levels deep here. Trace waterfall. The staircase: nineteen SELECTs one after another inside getDiscounts. Batch the query, don't add a machine. Detail on demand. Selecting a span fills the right pane with its fields. The waterfall never moves while you read. Overview then detail. A minimap of all 71 spans above the list, so the shape of the whole trace is visible before you scroll it. Categorical series palette. Five services, five hues, and the name in a column beside every one. Colour is never carrying it alone. Percentile summary. This span's duration against the whole distribution, with this trace marked—so you know if you're looking at the tail.
Trace / cart checkout September 11, 2026 Honeycomb sandbox, public dataset (signed out) dense · light · desktop-web
Seventy-one spans over 3.288 seconds for one checkout, and the shape gives the answer away before you read a single duration. Two thirds of the way down, getDiscounts runs for 2.576s—more than three quarters of the whole request —and underneath it nine visible SELECT spans step down and to the right in a staircase, each starting after the last one finished. The badge on the parent says 19. Nineteen queries in a loop, run one at a time, and the waterfall says so by its outline rather than by any number. That is the shape worth learning: siblings overlapping means concurrency, siblings in a staircase means something that should have been one query. The panel top right is the other good idea here—it plots the distribution of this span's duration across the whole dataset and marks where this particular trace fell, so you can see whether you are looking at a normal request or the tail before you start optimising.
  • Trace waterfall Indentation is causality, length is duration, horizontal position is when it started. Six levels deep here.
  • Trace waterfall The staircase: nineteen SELECTs one after another inside getDiscounts. Batch the query, don't add a machine.
  • Percentile summary This span's duration against the whole distribution, with this trace marked—so you know if you're looking at the tail.
  • Detail on demand Selecting a span fills the right pane with its fields. The waterfall never moves while you read.
  • Overview then detail A minimap of all 71 spans above the list, so the shape of the whole trace is visible before you scroll it.
  • Categorical series palette Five services, five hues, and the name in a column beside every one. Colour is never carrying it alone.
Honeycomb — Query / HEATMAP(duration_ms)
Heatmap. Linear y-axis, so the band holding most requests is six percent of the panel height and the empty top half gets the rest. Search across panels. The schema is the navigation, and it opens with a filter box rather than a tree you're expected to browse. Dashboard builder. No panel to configure—the query is the page. WHERE trace.parent_id does-not-exist is how you say root spans only. Tabs as genres. Five readings of one result: overview, BubbleUp, correlations, traces, raw. Each tab is a different question, not a different subject. Freshness indicator. When data last arrived, not when the page last ran. The one of the three ages that actually matters. Time-range picker. Absolute, with the granularity stated beside it, and arrows that step to the previous window rather than retyping it. Data source badge. Elapsed query time and 11,710,335 rows examined. The panel reporting its own cost and scope, which almost nothing else does.
Query / HEATMAP(duration_ms) September 10, 2026 Honeycomb sandbox, public dataset (signed out; no version string exposed) medium · light · desktop-web
My heatmap entry cites Honeycomb as the argument for log-scale y-buckets, so it's worth recording that this is Honeycomb's own sandbox rendering the same chart on a linear axis. The result is the failure the argument warns about: the ticks run 0 to 3500 evenly, the dense band where almost every request actually lives is squashed into the bottom sixth of the panel, and the top half is mostly empty. What survives anyway is the thing a percentile can't tell you. The solid band under a second doesn't move across the whole window, while from about 07:00 a separate purple tail climbs to 3000ms and keeps going. Two populations, one of them fine and one of them deteriorating. A p95 line over this data would have risen and said nothing about which. The other thing worth stealing: the footer reports elapsed query time and that it examined 11,710,335 rows, so the panel tells you what it cost and how much it looked at. Cookie banner and a no-signup onboarding modal were removed to take the shot; nothing of the product's own UI was.
  • Heatmap Linear y-axis, so the band holding most requests is six percent of the panel height and the empty top half gets the rest.
  • Dashboard builder No panel to configure—the query is the page. WHERE trace.parent_id does-not-exist is how you say root spans only.
  • Tabs as genres Five readings of one result: overview, BubbleUp, correlations, traces, raw. Each tab is a different question, not a different subject.
  • Search across panels The schema is the navigation, and it opens with a filter box rather than a tree you're expected to browse.
  • Time-range picker Absolute, with the granularity stated beside it, and arrows that step to the previous window rather than retyping it.
  • Data source badge Elapsed query time and 11,710,335 rows examined. The panel reporting its own cost and scope, which almost nothing else does.
  • Freshness indicator When data last arrived, not when the page last ran. The one of the three ages that actually matters.