Beelines and OpenTelemetry

Honeycomb’s data ingest path supports two different types of instrumentation: Beelines and 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.

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)
When you instrument your code with OpenTelemetry, you can either use a Honeycomb-created OpenTelemetry Exporter for your language; or run an OpenTelemetry Collector, then use the Honeycomb Collector Exporter to connect to Honeycomb

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.