Honeycomb statusLiveFetched seconds agoSource: status.honeycomb.io
Is Honeycomb down?
Live status check · All systems operational
Live status pulled from status.honeycomb.io, cached and revalidated every 60 seconds. Below: the components that can break, what to do during an incident, and how to keep your scheduled jobs running independently.
About Honeycomb status
Honeycomb is the developer-flavored observability platform built around wide-event tracing, with BubbleUp for anomaly detection and SLOs for reliability tracking. Smaller scale than Datadog but loved by infra and SRE teams; incidents usually scope to ingestion, query, or alert evaluation rather than the whole platform.
Components and surfaces that can break
- Surface 01
Event and trace ingestion (api.honeycomb.io).
- Surface 02
Query engine and BubbleUp anomaly detection.
- Surface 03
Triggers, SLO alert evaluation, and the dashboard.
Recent Honeycomb incidents
Honeycomb maintains a public incident history. Read the latest entries to see whether you're hitting a known issue, and look at the post-mortems for context on how long similar incidents typically take to clear.
What to do if Honeycomb is actually down
Ingestion outages: let the collector buffer
If api.honeycomb.io is degraded, the OpenTelemetry Collector and the Honeycomb SDKs buffer events client-side and retry. Events arrive late but generally aren't lost. Don't disable instrumentation mid-incident; you'll lose the catch-up window when ingestion recovers.
Query down doesn't mean events are dropped
The query layer is separate from ingestion. A query outage means you can't run BubbleUp, board queries, or ad-hoc investigations right now, but traces are still landing in the column store. Come back to the query once it recovers and the data will be there.
Triggers and SLOs evaluate on query, so pair critical alerts with an external watcher
Triggers and SLO burn-rate alerts run by executing a query on a schedule. If the query engine is degraded, those alerts can go silent rather than fire. For anything page-worthy, pair the Honeycomb Trigger with an independent probe (Crontap, a synthetic check) that hits a health endpoint directly.
Keep firing through the incident
Schedule your own Honeycomb health check with Crontap
Daily SLO budget burn check, weekly top-traces export, hourly anomaly query. Crontap fires the endpoint that runs your Honeycomb query and processes the result for Slack or a SQL warehouse, with retries on transient failures so a flaky query call doesn't silently skip a digest.
External HTTP cron hits your endpoint on the cadence you pick, stores every response, and emails you the moment a run fails. Pro schedules down to 1 minute; $3.25/mo annual flat for unlimited jobs.
Go deeper
Honeycomb status: FAQ
- Where can I see the official Honeycomb status?
- status.honeycomb.io publishes component status for ingestion, query, the UI, and Triggers/SLOs. The history page lists past incidents with timestamps and follow-up notes.
- Can I verify Honeycomb is receiving my traces on a schedule?
- Yes. Schedule a probe that emits a known test trace (a fixed service name and a unique marker field) via your OpenTelemetry Collector, waits a few seconds, then calls the Honeycomb Query API to assert that trace appears. Run it every few minutes with Crontap; if the assertion fails you'll know ingestion or query is degraded before your real alerts notice.
- What happens to my Triggers if Honeycomb query is down?
- Triggers and SLO alerts evaluate by running a query on a schedule. If the query engine is degraded, those evaluations can fail or be delayed, which means a real production problem may not page you during the incident. For anything truly critical, back the Honeycomb Trigger with an independent external check that doesn't depend on Honeycomb's query layer.