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To send data to Honeycomb, you will need to instrument your applications or infrastructure. If you are instrumenting code for the first time, we recommend using OpenTelemetry. Honeycomb supports receiving telemetry data via OpenTelemetry’s native protocol, OTLP, over gRPC, HTTP/protobuf, and HTTP/JSON. The minimum supported versions of OTLP protobuf definitions are 1.0 for traces, metrics, and logs.

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Pre-Instrumented Systems

If your system is instrumented with OpenTelemetry, you can send OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) data directly to Honeycomb: Set the OTLP exporter to point to Honeycomb. If a system is already instrumented with OpenTracing, Zipkin, or Jaeger, you can convert your data and export it using the OpenTelemetry Collector.

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Instrument Your Infrastructure

Get visibility into your infrastructure by sending its telemetry to Honeycomb.

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CI/CD

Instrument your build pipelines with Honeycomb buildevents, a small binary you can integrate into continuous integration/continuous delivery services. buildevents supports these platforms:
  • Travis CI
  • CircleCI
  • GitLab CI
  • Buildkite
  • Jenkins X
  • Google Cloud Build
  • GitHub Actions
  • Bitbucket Pipelines

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Service Meshes and API Gateways

Use an OpenTelemetry Collector to collect traces from Ambassador, AWS App Mesh, Istio, or Kong and export them to Honeycomb.

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Instrument Your Application

Instrument your application with OpenTelemetry by following the tutorials listed below. If your programming language is not listed above, you can set the OTLP exporter to point to Honeycomb in your language’s SDK. You can browse the available OpenTelemetry instrumentation SDKs on the OpenTelemetry Registry.

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OpenTelemetry Alternatives

Although we highly recommend using OpenTelemetry for instrumentation and export to Honeycomb, sometimes this is not possible.

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Libhoney

The Honeycomb API has an Events endpoint for sending events as JSON objects to Honeycomb. The Events API is unrelated to OpenTelemetry and the OTLP format. Libhoney, a suite of helper libraries for sending your events to Honeycomb via the Events API, is available for the following languages: For other languages, see our community contribution repository.

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Honeytail

Honeytail is an agent for ingesting log data into Honeycomb. It has built-in parsers for logs generated by ArangoDB, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and nginx. It also supports parsing common formats such as JSON, CSV, syslog, and keyval as well as parsing logs with custom regular expressions.