Common Issues with Honeycomb Alerts

If you need to troubleshoot alerts issues in Honeycomb, explore these solutions to common issues.

Tip

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General

Troubleshoot general alert issues.

Relational fields do not show up when working with SLOs or Triggers

We do not support relational fields in SLOs, Triggers, or Derived Columns. To emulate the functionality of relational fields, propagate the data you would like to see on to the spans so you can filter on them. For example, if you have data on a root span that you would like to be available to a child span, propagate that data to the child spans.

Tip

If you are using OpenTelemetry, you can enable field propagation from root spans to child spans by using OpenTelemetry concept of baggage. For an example using the OpenTelemetry for JavaScript SDK, visit OpenTelemetry Javascript SDK: Add Multi-Span Attributes. To see examples for other programming languages, check out our documentation for other OpenTelemetry SDKs.

SLOs

Troubleshoot alert issues related to Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

Exhaustion Time Burn Alert

Because an incident can dramatically deplete your SLO budget, an Exhaustion Time burn alert may take a long time to resolve even after addressing the incident and deploying a fix. It takes time for this data to age out and recovery to occur.

This means that an Exhaustion Time burn alert will remain in a fired state after triggering. If your budget stabilizes, and then starts burning again without ever going back above zero percent (0%), you will not be alerted a second time. If this scenario is not ideal, you can do one of the following:

Configure a Budget Rate Alert: Budget Rate Alerts fire regardless of your current budget.
Reset your SLO Budget. This will erase past failed events in your SLO window, which may impact your charts.