Beelines and OpenTelemetry

Honeycomb’s data ingest path supports several different types of instrumentation, including two approaches specific to instrumenting code: Honeycomb’s Beelines and vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry. Both of these approaches generate the structured event data format that will help you get the most out of Honeycomb.

New to instrumenting code? Want to learn about structured events? Read more about instrumentation.

Beelines vs. OpenTelemetry 🔗

When Should I Use Beelines? 🔗

Beelines are Honeycomb-created libraries. They are designed to provide the strongest support for language and framework auto-instrumentation.
When you install a Beeline, Honeycomb will auto-instrument some features of your code – see the language-specific instructions for details.
Honeycomb has supported Beelines for Go, Python, Ruby, Java and JavaScript. There are also a number of community contributed Beelines.
The Beelines provide a variety of sampling options; from simple 1 in X sample rates to more complex scenarios where a user application can make the sampling decision itself. More information regarding sampling with the Beelines can be found here.

When Should I Use OpenTelemetry? 🔗

OpenTelemetry is an open standard for handling distributed trace data. The events that OpenTelemetry creates will work within Honeycomb.
OpenTelemetry is available for a wide variety of languages (albeit at different stages of maturity); a list of SDKs can be found at the OpenTelemetry Registry;
When you instrument your code with OpenTelemetry, you can use an OTLP exporter to send directly to Honeycomb.
Sampling is currently a work in progress in OpenTelemetry where a pluggable model is used with some default samplers bundled with the SDKs. Honeycomb is working on providing compatible implementations to what the Beelines offer.

Neither Secure Tenancy nor Refinery currently support OTLP ingest. To use them with OpenTelemetry instrumentation, you must run a Honeycomb Exporter to export Honeycomb JSON data.

What is the Honeycomb Roadmap? 🔗

As OpenTelemetry grows to embrace more languages, Honeycomb plans to continue to support OpenTelemetry; we see OpenTelemetry as a key component of our ability to support many different programming languages and environments.

Tracing Interoperability 🔗

You don’t need to instrument all the services in your stack the same way. If one service is instrumented with OpenTelemetry and another with Beelines, you can still get trace visualizations that include them both! In order to do that, the Beelines include marshal and unmarshal functions that can generate and parse W3C Trace Context headers, the format used by OpenTelemetry.

To learn more about ongoing development for W3C trace context propagation, visit the W3C Trace Context GitHub repository.