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How It Works

OpenTelemetry SDKs are implemented and stable for several languages. They provide an API, which allows your application to create custom metrics with metrics instruments like counters, histograms, and gauges. Instrumentation libraries used in different languages can also capture metrics from the application’s runtime environment, such as the number of HTTP requests served by an HTTP server. OpenTelemetry SDKs can then be configured to send metrics to Honeycomb over OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP).

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Instrumenting Your Application

Refer to the OpenTelemetry SDK Documentation for your environment for details on how to instrument your application. You will need to enable an OTLP exporter and it should have:
  • a destination of:
    • for our US instance: api.honeycomb.io:443
    • for our EU instance: api.eu1.honeycomb.io:443
  • an x-honeycomb-team header with an API key that has write permissions
With the current metrics experience, Honeycomb routes all of your metrics to a managed metrics dataset (named Metrics) automatically, so you do not need to specify a dataset.
The x-honeycomb-dataset header applied to the legacy metrics experience, where it named the dataset metrics were sent to. It is no longer used to route metrics and can be omitted.

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Troubleshooting Metrics

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Metrics Sent to unknown_metrics

unknown_metrics was the default destination in the legacy metrics experience when no dataset was specified with the x-honeycomb-dataset header. With the current metrics experience, metrics are routed to the managed Metrics dataset automatically, so this no longer applies.
This troubleshooting scenario is not applicable to Honeycomb Classic users.