Honeycomb AI Connector

Connect Rootly AI to Honeycomb — traces, metrics, logs, BubbleUp investigations, Triggers, and SLOs — with a region selection and one OAuth authorization.

Overview

The Honeycomb connector lets Rootly AI query your Honeycomb environments during an investigation. Honeycomb is where high-cardinality trace data lives, so this is the connector that answers “which specific requests are failing, and what do they have in common?” — the question raw dashboards usually can’t.

Setup is a region selection followed by an OAuth authorization. There is no API key to create or paste.

Rootly requests Honeycomb’s mcp:read OAuth scope. The connector passes through Honeycomb’s available MCP tool catalog, so the OAuth grant and the connected account’s permissions are the boundary for what a tool can do. Keep the grant read-scoped if investigations should only query data.

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Before You Start

Honeycomb Account · required

An account with access to the environments you want Rootly AI to query. Rootly AI inherits the read access of whoever authorizes the connection.

Your Honeycomb Region · required

Honeycomb runs separate US and EU instances and your data lives in exactly one. You’ll pick this during setup, and picking the wrong one means Rootly AI authorizes against an instance that doesn’t hold your environments.

Rootly Permission To Manage Connectors · required

Connecting a data source requires the permission to manage AI connectors on your Rootly account. If the Connect button is unavailable, ask a Rootly admin.

If you’re not sure which region you’re on, check the URL you use to sign in to Honeycomb. EU accounts sign in on an eu1 host; US accounts don’t.

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Connecting

1. Open the Honeycomb Card

   Go to AI SRE → Atlas → Connectors (AI & Agents → Connectors if your sidebar doesn’t have an AI SRE item) and click Connect on the Honeycomb card. The Connect Honeycomb dialog opens.

2. Name the Connection

   Enter a Connection name to identify this Honeycomb account in Rootly AI.

3. Choose Your Region

   Honeycomb region · US or EU · required

   Pick US for environments hosted in the US region, or EU for environments hosted in the EU region. This is required — the dialog won’t submit without a selection.

4. Authorize Rootly

   Rootly redirects you to Honeycomb’s authorization screen. Sign in if prompted and grant access. Rootly requests a read-only scope.

5. Confirm the Card Shows Connected

   Back on the Connectors page, the Honeycomb card shows Connected with Configure and Disconnect actions. Rootly AI can now query Honeycomb during investigations.

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What Rootly AI Can Read

Signal	What it answers during an investigation
Traces	Which requests are slow or failing, and where in the call path the time or error originates
Metrics	Rate, error, and duration trends across the window around the incident
Logs	Individual events with their full attribute set, not just aggregate counts
BubbleUp	What the failing requests have in common that the healthy ones don’t — the specific customer, region, build, or endpoint driving the anomaly
Triggers	Which Honeycomb Triggers fired, and when, relative to the incident timeline
SLOs	Current SLO compliance and remaining error budget for the affected service

Rootly AI can read across the full range of Honeycomb queries rather than a fixed subset, and reaches for whichever read the current question needs.

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During an Incident

“Checkout latency is concentrated in one trace pattern. BubbleUp shows 94% of the slow requests share build a3f21c and the eu-west-1 region — the other regions on the previous build look normal.”

Honeycomb earns its place in an investigation when the question is which requests are affected rather than how many. Error-rate dashboards tell you something is wrong; trace data plus BubbleUp tells you the failures all share one deploy, one region, or one customer tier — which is usually the fastest path to a cause.

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Best Practices

• Connect Honeycomb alongside a deploy source. Honeycomb tells you the failing requests share a build; GitHub tells you what was in that build. The pair answers “what changed” far faster than either alone.
• Authorize with an account that can see every relevant environment. Rootly AI inherits the authorizing user’s read access. Authorize from an account scoped to one team’s environment and investigations will silently miss the rest.
• Keep your Triggers meaningful. Rootly AI reads which Triggers fired and treats that as signal. Noisy Triggers that fire constantly reduce how much that signal is worth.
• Reconnect after an account change. The authorization is tied to the user who granted it. When that person leaves or their Honeycomb access is reduced, reconnect from another account rather than leaving a connection that quietly returns less data.

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Troubleshooting

'Choose a Honeycomb region to connect'

The region field is required and the dialog rejects a submission without it. Select US or EU and submit again.

Connected successfully, but Rootly AI finds no data

Almost always the wrong region. A US-region authorization against an EU account connects cleanly — the OAuth flow succeeds — but Rootly AI is then querying an instance that holds none of your environments. Disconnect, reconnect, and pick the other region. Check the host you use to sign in to Honeycomb if you’re unsure.

Rootly AI sees some environments but not others

Rootly AI inherits the read access of the account that authorized the connection. If that account can only see a subset of your Honeycomb environments, so can Rootly AI. Reconnect from an account with broader read access.

The authorization screen never opens

Usually a popup blocker or an existing Honeycomb session in a different account. Allow popups for Rootly, or sign out of Honeycomb in that browser and retry so you can authorize with the intended account.

Queries worked, then stopped returning results

If someone revoked Rootly’s authorization on the Honeycomb side, the card can still read Connected while every query fails. Disconnect and reconnect to establish a fresh authorization.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a Honeycomb API key?

No. Setup is a region selection plus an OAuth authorization — there’s no key to create, paste, or rotate.

Can Rootly AI change anything in Honeycomb?

Rootly requests the mcp:read OAuth scope, which limits the grant to reads. It does not apply a separate Rootly tool-name allowlist to Honeycomb’s MCP catalog. Check the connected account’s permissions and the grant if you need to verify what an investigation can access.

Can I connect both a US and an EU Honeycomb instance?

Yes. Add a separate Honeycomb connection for each region, and give each a distinct Connection name so investigations can select the right one.

How is this different from connecting Datadog or Grafana?

They answer different questions. Datadog and Grafana are strongest on aggregate metrics and dashboards — how bad is it, and since when. Honeycomb is strongest on high-cardinality trace data — which requests specifically, and what do they share. Teams that run both connect both.

Does Rootly store our Honeycomb data?

Rootly doesn’t keep a persistent copy of your Honeycomb data — queries run at investigation time and the response is used in reasoning only. Query results do appear in the LLM traces Rootly logs for quality monitoring, as with every tool call Rootly AI makes. See Data Privacy for Rootly AI for the retention boundary.

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Related Pages

Connectors Overview

All connectors and how they fit together.

GitHub

Pair with Honeycomb to tie a failing trace pattern back to the deploy that caused it.

Data Privacy for Rootly AI

What Rootly AI sees, retention, and model training controls.