Observability creators Honeycomb announced the acquisition of Grit, an open-source query system and AI agent, to help customers instrument complex software systems for end-to-end observability. And the company also announced the appointment of two executives to its leadership team, with Julie Neumann joining as Chief Marketing Officer and Matt Nelson as Chief Revenue Officer.
These announcements also follow significant revenue growth and customer expansion in 2024, driven by the launch of Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline, Log Analytics, and Frontend Observability.
One substantial hurdle companies face as they implement modern tooling is instrumenting existing code to emit telemetry data using OpenTelemetry. Grit developed an open-source query system and AI agent that can programmatically search and modify codebases.
Through this deal, Honeycomb will be able to make it dramatically easier to adopt custom instrumentation. Grit’s founder, Morgante Pell, is joining the Honeycomb engineering team to lead development of even more AI features that can combine Grit’s codebase knowledge with Honeycomb’s rich observability data to build better software.
Honeycomb has also made strategic executive hires to accelerate its go-to-market functions and expand into new markets.
— Julie Neumann (CMO) is a veteran storyteller who drove market expansion at Sinch, Testlio, and Snow Software, will spearhead efforts to bring the transformative value of Honeycomb to a global audience of developers and executives
— Matt Nelson (CRO) has a history of driving substantial revenue growth at Forter, VMware, and Pivotal Software, will lead the global revenue organization, including sales, customer success, and strategic partnerships
KEY QUOTES:
“Honeycomb is committed to helping engineering teams realize the full potential of AI, while delivering the system reliability and exceptional experiences their customers expect. Grit’s technology solves major OpenTelemetry adoption hurdles, delivering the comprehensive observability our customers need to effectively manage their software systems and AI-powered applications.”
“Julie and Matt’s combined decades of experience in the enterprise, as well as their unwavering commitment to driving impactful growth at developer-oriented organizations, will be instrumental to Honeycomb’s success. In a new era of software development, they will ensure more businesses are ready for tomorrow’s engineering challenges, including taking advantage of AI while mitigating the inherent risks.”
– Christine Yen, CEO and cofounder
