Honeycomb is an observability platform that helps software engineering teams understand and debug their complex production systems. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Honeycomb co-founder and CEO Christine Yen to learn more.
Christine Yen’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Yen said:
“As CEO and co-founder of Honeycomb, I help engineering teams simplify complexity and deliver reliable, high-performing software. My roots as a developer continue to shape how I lead, grounding every decision in technical understanding and a commitment to helping teams thrive.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Yen shared:
“Charity and I met at Parse, a mobile infrastructure startup acquired by Facebook in 2013. We were blown away by Facebook’s homegrown data management platform, Scuba. The breadth and depth of the information available to engineers to make sense of the various systems at play was transformative. However, during our time there, we noticed that systems crashed frequently, but rarely for the same reasons. We had to spend excessive time trying to identify the source of the problem to gain more control over the reliability issues we were facing. It was then that we realized we needed a platform that could identify issues across an entire codebase, pinpoint which users were impacted, and roll out a fix quickly, which inspired us to create Honeycomb.io.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Yen reflected:
“Honeycomb established the observability category and transformed how companies understand and manage the growing complexity of their software systems.”
“It all started back in 2017, when Charity gave a talk at an industry conference, Monitorama. The talk was titled Monitor: a Post Mortem, which was generally controversial given the focus of the event. During her talk, she introduced the idea of observability. The next year, six talks included or featured observability. Clearly, what we had created resonated with the developer community. By 2019, there were even more keynotes and sessions focused on observability, and Monitorama had added “observability practitioners” to the subtitle of the event.”
“That talk from Charity remains one of my favorite moments from my time at Honeycomb because it is a memory that continued to evolve as our work gained traction and people began to recognize the impact of observability.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Yen explained:
“Honeycomb is crucial for engineering teams that need fast feedback loops to quickly resolve issues and focus their time on high-value, innovative work that drives business growth. As organizations deploy increasing amounts of AI-generated code, Honeycomb delivers deep, contextual visibility into how that code behaves in production, while helping engineers detect and address issues before they impact users.”
“As AI reshapes computing, observability has become essential for ensuring reliability, security, and performance. Honeycomb has long been “AI-ready,” helping engineering teams adapt and deliver exceptional software experiences. Still, we have continued to update our product suite to help our customers navigate the AI era.”
“Last Fall, we launched Honeycomb Intelligence, a new and unique AI observability solution that empowers every developer to understand their systems. It amplifies engineering teams with automatic anomaly detection to intelligently surface performance issues and AI-assisted investigations for quicker results. Unlike existing solutions, where data is too fragmented and querying is too slow for the AI era, Honeycomb Intelligence is able to quickly access terabytes of data with context. We also began offering an MCP server in February, way before competitors jumped on the bandwagon, which provides customers with accelerated delivery and debugging inside their IDE. As a part of Honeycomb Intelligence, we also recently introduced Honeycomb Private Cloud, Honeycomb Metrics, and Canvas, which combine security, performance, and AI-driven intelligence to help organizations deliver resilient and high-quality digital experiences for their customers.”
“We have also expanded our product suite to assist engineers working across different development fields with Honeycomb for Frontend Observability and a newly announced technical partnership with Embrace, which enables engineering teams to gain deep insights into web application and mobile performance and the subsequent user experiences. It provides software developers with a complete picture of their application’s performance and bridges the gap between backend and frontend observability.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently (and how did you overcome those challenges? Yen acknowledged:
“Our biggest challenge is getting people to step outside of their comfort zones, and take the leap with a new technology that can make their work much easier.”
“The overall problem that we solve, which is helping engineers understand what is happening with their code, is a problem that has existed since software has existed. That being said, the way that we build software today is very different from the way we built software 5 or 10 years ago.”
“As we continue to try to answer the question, “what the heck is my software doing”, we are faced with the reality that tools need to keep up with the fundamental changes in how you build software. But the unfortunate truth is that people don’t like to change their workflows or their patterns.”
“Because of that, our ongoing challenge continues to be helping folks step away from what they’re familiar with and think about what it means to build great software, support great software, maintain great software, in the world going forward.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Yen noted:
“When we started out, no one was talking about observability, and because of this, our point of view had to stand out in a sea of legacy APM, logging, and monitoring vendors. We needed to create a tool that was really good at solving the hard problems, or as we like to say, making the things that felt impossible, feel possible and easy. Because of the space we were in and the players we were competing against, we originally built Honeycomb for power users and challenging use cases. That being said, we never wanted Honeycomb to be a tool that was only built for experts.”
“Over the years, as more and more folks have recognized that the way they used to do things, like using traditional APM capabilities, won’t get them where they need to go, they are starting to look for observability tools that map to the complexity of today’s modern software and AI-driven world. As a result, our product priorities have expanded to focus on usability and creating great entry points. This shift has been especially rewarding because it brought us back to Honeycomb’s original vision: building a platform that any engineer can use to gain deeper intuition and understanding of their systems.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Yen cited:
“The advent of MCP in the industry overall, and specifically the release of Honeycomb’s MCP server, is a huge milestone, and really a turning point for the tech industry. Up to this point, so much of observability has been constrained to the UI that vendors offer. While Honeycomb has its own UI, it’s a fact that any UI is inherently limited.”
“With MCP, users are able to plug directly into Honeycomb as a source of data, and as a source of truth about what their software is doing, which raises the bar for what users are going to expect from working with an observability tool. As MCP progresses, the default is going to become that observability tools not only speak their language and reflect back terms in their business, but also answer precise user questions, which is a really exciting change.”
“For engineering teams shipping AI-powered products, the line between observability and investigation is disappearing. At Scribe, whose AI documentation tools serve 94% of the Fortune 500, engineers are integrating Honeycomb’s MCP server with Claude Code to query system behavior and investigate alerts conversationally. The result is an observability practice that reduced debugging time from an hour to five minutes and cut observability costs by 75%.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Yen concluded:
“As the leaders in observability (often co-opted and diluted by legacy application monitoring providers), Honeycomb offers the most modern approach to finding issues across an entire codebase, and we’re committed to evolving and expanding as the AI industry continues to grow. While traditional monitoring, APM, and logging tools were built for predictable systems, observability tools like Honeycomb are built for AI’s modern, complex, and distributed systems. As AI becomes part of more systems, Honeycomb helps teams succeed by providing accurate and intuitive visibility into how their AI models perform.”
“Here’s the thing: your systems are already complex enough. Now you’re integrating LLMs, experimenting with agents, trying to understand what’s happening inside these nondeterministic black boxes. The last thing you need is for your observability platform to add to that complexity or force you to rip and replace what’s already working.”
“We believe in being that stable foundation you can count on while everything else is in flux. When you’re trying to figure out why your AI feature is behaving weirdly in production, or when you need to understand the ripple effects of swapping out one model for another, Honeycomb is there—giving you the context and speed you need to actually debug the problem, not just stare at dashboards.”
“Our philosophy has always been about getting out of your way so you can focus on the problem you’re trying to solve, not wrestling with the tool itself. That matters even more now. As you navigate this rapidly changing AI space, you need observability that adapts with you, that lets you ask questions you didn’t know you needed to ask yesterday. That’s what we’re here for.”
