Honeycomb Trace Explorer

Honeycomb is an observability platform that offers distributed tracing, which is a method for tracking the path an application's requests take through a system. As a product, Honeycomb can ingest, store, aggregate, query, and display trace data.

The Honeycomb Trace Waterfall is an interactive visual interface for exploring data within an individual trace, and it's part of the core exploration loop within the product. I partnered with Product and Engineering to research customer needs and pain points and with our Visual Design team to explore a new look and feel that reflects the next iteration of our design system.

This redesign includes time span zoom, subtree isolation, an interactive trace summary, better error navigation, improved visual design, and pinned fields in the sidebar to make it easier for teams to highlight and share important information during investigations.

Early analytics and feedback from the trace summary release show significant improvement in the speed of finding critical spans during investigations. This redesign was so much fun to work on, and I can't wait to see where our teams and customers take it next.

To view one of the iterations as a clickable prototype, please contact me.