Used For

• +**Your production site slows to a crawl and you have no idea why** → Query shows exactly which database call is taking 10 seconds, fix it in one shot
• +**Microservices fail in a chain reaction and you're playing detective** → Service map shows the exact path from user click to failure point
• +**You get alerts but spend 2 hours figuring out root cause** → BubbleUp automatically groups related errors and points to what actually broke
• +Handles millions of data points without slowing down - queries finish in under 10 seconds even on huge datasets
• +AI agents answer questions in plain English - ask "why are my database calls slow" and get actual answers

Best For

• >Your app keeps breaking and you spend hours digging through logs to figure out why
• >You have microservices and when one thing breaks, everything breaks mysteriously
• >You're getting 3am alerts but have no idea which service is actually causing the problem

Not For

• -Small teams under 20 people with simple apps — you'll pay enterprise prices to debug problems you could solve with basic logs
• -Anyone wanting plug-and-play monitoring — this requires setting up data pipelines and learning query syntax
• -Teams on tight budgets — the usage-based pricing can jump from $100 to $1000+ if you don't configure sampling properly

Pairs With

• *OpenTelemetry (the main way to actually send your app data to Honeycomb for analysis)
• *PagerDuty (where you get the 3am alerts that Honeycomb helps you actually solve)
• *GitHub Actions (to automatically send deployment data so you know if new code broke something)
• *AWS S3 (to store old debugging data cheaply instead of paying full price forever)
• *Slack (where your team celebrates fixing production issues in 3 minutes instead of 3 hours)
• *Grafana (for pretty dashboards because Honeycomb's charts look more functional than beautiful)

The Catch

• !The sticker price is just the start — high-traffic apps can hit $2000+ monthly bills if you don't set up sampling rules correctly
• !You'll need someone technical to configure it properly or your data costs will explode in the first week
• !The AI features are still immature — they work for basic queries but need human review for complex debugging

Bottom Line

Turns 3-hour debugging sessions into 3-minute searches, but the cost meter runs fast if you don't configure sampling right.