About SDKs

Honeycomb SDKs are libraries are built to help you instrument your code easily. Honeycomb is most powerful when it has a wide surface of structured data to work with, so each library is geared towards building up Events and sending each Event into Honeycomb.

Each SDK is optimized to:

1. Send events to Honeycomb in the background to avoid blocking your code.
2. Use minimal resources to avoid interfering with your application.
3. Batch events efficiently for sending automatically.

On Events

Honeycomb SDKs are oriented at the construction and sending of Event objects/structs.

Each Event holds multiple key/value pairs (“attributes”). Values can be numbers (integers or floating point numbers), strings (version numbers, customer IDs, email addresses, host names, etc.), or booleans. These values together give a full picture of what is happening in your code as it does the work represented by the Event.

In order to help gather information that appears at different parts of the application and has different scope, the library has several methods of adding attributes to an event or series of events.

• The Global scope is the widest. Attributes added to the global scope will be included in every Event generated from that point forward.
• A Builder is an Event factory. Any events created from that Builder inherit any attributes that have been added to that Builder, and will override any similarly-named attributes added to the global scope.
• An Event is the narrowest scope. Attributes added to an event are sent with that Event and none other, possibly overriding similarly-named attributes inherited from the global scope or a Builder.