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Honeycomb Agent Skills is a collection of skills, agents, and hooks for enhancing AI-assisted code workflows. These skills provide OpenTelemetry best practices, Honeycomb feature usage, production issue debugging, and more.

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Available skills

Installing the Honeycomb plugin gives your AI assistant eight skills for observability workflows:
  • query-patterns: Build effective Honeycomb queries with patterns for column selection, filtering, and aggregation.
  • production-investigation: Debug latency spikes, error rates, and other production anomalies with step-by-step reasoning.
  • slos-and-triggers: Define and manage SLOs and alert triggers in Honeycomb.
  • otel-instrumentation: Instrument applications with OpenTelemetry, including span creation, attribute naming, and context propagation.
  • otel-migration: How to migrate proprietary or legacy instrumentation to OpenTelemetry.
  • beeline-migration: Guidlines for migrating from Honeycomb Beelines to OpenTelemetry SDKs.
  • observability-fundamentals: Core concepts around distributed tracing, wide events, and production-grade observability.
  • create-honeycomb-board: Create Honeycomb boards to capture investigations and share insights.

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Available agents

Two autonomous agents are included for more complex tasks:
  • honeycomb-investigator: Autonomously investigates production issues by querying Honeycomb data, identifying patterns, and summarizing findings.
  • instrumentation-advisor: Analyzes your codebase to find instrumentation gaps and suggest improvements based on OpenTelemetry best practices.

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Additional capabilities

  • Column validation hooks: Prevent queries with invalid or mistyped column names before they are sent to Honeycomb.
  • Schema caching: Reduce repeated lookups by caching dataset column schemas locally during a session.
  • Honeycomb MCP integration: Query traces, check SLOs and triggers, run BubbleUp analysis, and create boards.

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Install the plugin

The following tools support direct plugin installation, which sets up all skills, agents, hooks, and MCP configuration.

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Claude Code

claude plugin marketplace add honeycombio/agent-skill
claude plugin install honeycomb
After installation, run /honeycomb-setup to connect the Honeycomb MCP server and complete authentication.

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Cursor

Add as a remote rule in the Cursor settings:
  1. Open Settings > Rules > Project Rules.
  2. Select Add Rule > Remote Rule.
  3. Enter the URL: https://github.com/honeycombio/agent-skill

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Augment (Auggie CLI)

auggie plugin marketplace add honeycombio/agent-skill
auggie plugin install honeycomb

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GitHub Copilot CLI

copilot plugin install honeycombio/agent-skill:honeycomb

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Other tools

Many AI coding tools support skills and MCP servers through their own configuration. To use Honeycomb with these tools, you’ll generally need to:
  1. Add skills: Copy the skill files from the agent-skill repository into the skills directory your tool expects.
  2. Configure the MCP server: Point your tool at the Honeycomb MCP endpoint — https://mcp.honeycomb.io/mcp (or https://mcp.eu1.honeycomb.io/mcp for EU).
Refer to your tool’s documentation for specifics:
ToolSkills DocsMCP Docs
VS Code with GitHub CopilotAgent Skills, Agent PluginsMCP Servers
OpenAI Codex CLISkillsConfiguration
ClineRulesMCP Servers
Windsurf—MCP Configuration
Amazon Q Developer—MCP Servers
For tools that only support MCP (not skills), your agent will have access to Honeycomb query tools but won’t have the built-in observability reasoning and instrumentation guidance that skills provide. See the Honeycomb MCP configuration guide for more details on connecting to the MCP server.
Don’t see your tool listed? Open an issue on GitHub to request support.

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Connecting to Honeycomb

OAuth is the recommended authentication method. It uses a browser-based flow and does not require you to manage API keys. When you first invoke a Honeycomb MCP tool, your agent will open a browser window to complete the authorization flow. Pick your Honeycomb environment and grant the required permissions. Once authorized, your agent can access Honeycomb data for the rest of the session.

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API Key (headless environments)

For autonomous or unattended agents that cannot complete an interactive OAuth flow, use an API key.
  1. Generate a Management API key in Honeycomb under Account > Team Settings > API Keys.
  2. Grant the Model Context Protocol and Environments scopes with Read permissions (and Write if you want the create_board tool).
  3. Format the key as KEY_ID:SECRET_KEY and pass it as a Bearer token in the Authorization header.
See the configuration guide for a full example configuration.

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EU region

If your Honeycomb team is on the EU instance, use https://mcp.eu1.honeycomb.io/mcp in place of the US endpoint in all configurations above.

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Next steps