Create Events

Honeycomb API (1.0.0)

The API allows programmatic management of many resources within Honeycomb.

Please report any discrepancies with actual API behavior in Pollinators Slack or to Honeycomb Support.

https://docs.honeycomb.io

Download OpenAPI description

api.json

api.yaml

Overview

E-mail support@honeycomb.io

License Apache 2.0

Servers

https://api.honeycomb.io/

https://api.eu1.honeycomb.io/

Auth

API Keys have various scopes permissions and belong to a specific Team or Environment.

Any valid Honeycomb ingest or configuration API Key will work with this endpoint. Learn more about API keys.

These endpoints can be used to validate authentication for a key, to determine what authorizations have been granted to a key, and to determine the Team and Environment that a key belongs to.

Operations

Boards

Boards are a place to pin and save useful queries and graphs you want to retain for later reuse and reference.

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete Boards.

Operations

Burn Alerts

This feature is available as part of the Honeycomb Pro and Enterprise plans.

Burn Alerts notify you when issues impact your SLO budget. Learn more about Burn Alerts here.

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete burn alerts.

Operations

Columns

Columns are fields in the events you send to Honeycomb.

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete columns in a dataset.

Operations

Datasets

A Dataset represents a collection of related events that come from the same source, or are related to the same source.

This API allows you to list, create, and update datasets.

Operations

Dataset Definitions

Dataset definitions describe the fields with special meaning in the Dataset.

Refer to the Dataset Definitions documentation for more information.

Honeycomb automatically creates these Dataset definition fields when the Dataset is created. Manual creation of Dataset definitions is not needed.

Operations

Derived Columns

Derived columns allow you to run queries based on the value of an expression that is derived from the columns in an event.

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete derived columns in a dataset or across a whole environment, paralleling the behavior of the Schema tab within a Dataset's or Environment's Settings UI.

Operations

Events

The Events API endpoints are the lowest-level way to send Events to Honeycomb. This should be your last resort!

If unsure where to start when instrumenting an application, read about how to Send Data to Honeycomb.

If you are building a tracing or metrics library, we recommend using OpenTelemetry.

Operations

Authorization

It is recommended that an Ingest API key is used for sending events.

A Configuration API key will work, and must have the Send Events permission. Learn more about API keys here.

Create Events

Request

Supports batch creation of events.

Dataset names are case insensitive. POST requests to "MyDatasET" will land in the same dataset as "mydataset". Names may contain URL-encoded spaces or other special characters, but not URL-encoded slashes. For example, "My%20Dataset" will show up in the UI as "My Dataset".

The first event received for a dataset determines the casing of the displayed name. All subsequent variations in casing will use the originally specified case.

Path

datasetSlugstringrequired

The dataset slug.

Headers

Content-Encodingstring

Included when sending events in a file. Size limitations may be addressed by compressing request bodies with gzip or zstd compression. Be sure to set the Content-Encoding to gzip or zst.

Enum"gzip""zst"

Example: gzip

Body

required

The array should contain one or more JSON objects representing Events. Each Event contains its payload under the data key. Values of time and/or samplerate can be included as well.

The JSON payload should have the structure:

[{ "data": { "key1": "value1", "key2": 2.0 } }, ... ]

Size limitations may be addressed by compressing request bodies with gzip or zstd compression.

An empty 202 response indicates that the event has been queued for processing.

string(binary)

curl -i -X POST \
  'https://api.honeycomb.io/1/batch/{datasetSlug}' \
  -H 'Content-Encoding: gzip' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/octet-stream' \
  -H 'X-Honeycomb-Team: YOUR_API_KEY_HERE' \
  -d string

Responses

Enqueued for processing

Bodyapplication/jsonArray [

statusnumber

errorstring

]

Response

application/json

[
  {
    "status": 202
  },
  {
    "status": 400,
    "error": "Request body should not be empty."
  },
  {
    "status": 400,
    "error": "Event has too many columns."
  },
  {
    "status": 400,
    "error": "Request body is malformed and cannot be read."
  }
]

Create an Event

Request

Using this endpoint for anything more than testing is highly discouraged.

Sending events in batches will be much more efficient and should be preferred if at all possible.

Path

datasetSlugstringrequired

The dataset slug.

Headers

X-Honeycomb-Event-Timeinteger

The Event's timestamp. Optional. Defaults to server time.

X-Honeycomb-Samplerateinteger

Optional. Defaults to 1.

Bodyapplication/jsonrequired

The request body is limited to raw (potentially compressed) size of 100KB.

The maximum number of distinct columns (fields) allowed in an event is 2000.

property name*string or number or boolean[ 1 .. 2000 ] itemsadditional property

A collection of key-value properties that represent the Event. Honeycomb supports basic data types for the values of each Event attribute.

Limits

2,000 fields per event. The entire event must be less than 100KB of uncompressed JSON.
String Fields: Each string field has a maximum length of 64KB.
Number Fields: Integers and Floats are both 64-bit.

curl -i -X POST \
  'https://api.honeycomb.io/1/events/{datasetSlug}' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'X-Honeycomb-Event-Time: 0' \
  -H 'X-Honeycomb-Samplerate: 0' \
  -H 'X-Honeycomb-Team: YOUR_API_KEY_HERE' \
  -d '{
    "method": "GET",
    "endpoint": "/foo",
    "shard": "users",
    "duration_ms": 32
  }'

Responses

Enqueued for processing

Response

application/json

The body is empty, or blank.

{
  "error": "Request body should not be empty."
}

Environments

This API allows you to list, create, and update, and delete Environments.

Operations

Key Management

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete API Keys for a Team.

Operations

Kinesis Events

The Kinesis Events API endpoints allow Honeycomb to process streaming events from Amazon Kinesis.

Refer to the Honeycomb AWS integrations documentation for more information.

Operations

Markers

Markers indicate points in time on graphs where interesting things happen, such as deploys or outages.

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete Markers.

Operations

Marker Settings

Marker Settings apply to groups of similar Markers. For example, "deploys" markers appear with the same color on a graph.

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete Marker Settings.

Operations

Queries

Queries in Honeycomb are specifications for queries, and are used to identify queries in other parts of the API - in particular: boards, triggers, and query annotations.

This API allows you to create and get query objects.

Operations

Query Annotations

Query Annotations in Honeycomb allow you to associate names and descriptions to queries to add additional information in collaboration features.

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete Query Annotations.

Operations

Query Data

This feature is available as part of the Honeycomb Enterprise plan.

Query Results are the aggregated data from a Query, similar to what is displayed in graphs or heatmaps within the Honeycomb UI. Receiving results from a Query is a three-step process:

Create the Query (or Query Spec), which validates that the query parameters are valid. Creating a query does not actually run the query to get results. Run the query asynchronously by creating a Query Result referencing the Query’s ID. This returns a Query Result ID. Poll the query result endpoint (with the Query Result ID) until the data is ready.

Note that many Query Results can be created from a single Query. This is particularly useful when using a relative time_range parameter in the Query. For example, a Query with time_range: 7200 and no explicit start_time or end_time can be re-run over and over, with each resulting Query Result containing the most recent 2 hours of data. This is conceptually similar to clicking Run Query in the Honeycomb UI without changing any query parameters.

IMPORTANT API RESTRICTIONS:

To ensure the stability of Honeycomb systems, we have enabled the following API restrictions. These restrictions may change over time.

Query Results can only be created for events with timestamps within the past 7 days.
When creating a Query Result, the time ranges from the Query are truncated according to the following rules. For queries with a time range of:
- less than or equal to 6 hours, results are truncated to the nearest 1 minute. For example, a start/end time of 2021-04-22T05:28:12Z will be truncated to 2021-04-22T05:28:00Z.
- greater than 6 hours and less than or equal to 2 days, results are truncated to the nearest 5 minutes. For example, a start/end time of 2021-04-22T05:28:12Z will be truncated to 2021-04-22T05:25:00Z.
- greater than 2 days and less than or equal to 7 days, results are truncated to the nearest 30 minutes. For example, a start/end time of 2021-04-22T05:28:12Z will be truncated to 2021-04-22T05:00:00Z.
Creating a Query Result is rate limited to 10 requests per minute. Status code 429 will be returned when rate limited.
Query Results cannot take longer than 10 seconds to run.

Operations

Recipients

Honeycomb Recipients allow you to define and manage the Recipients that will get notified by a Trigger or Burn Alert.

The types of Recipients supported are: PagerDuty, Email, Webhook, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.

Operations

SLOs

This feature is available as part of the Honeycomb Pro and Enterprise plans.

Honeycomb SLOs allow you to define and monitor Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for your organization.

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete SLO objects.

Operations

Triggers

Triggers let you receive notifications when your data in Honeycomb crosses the thresholds that you configure. The graph on which to alert is as flexible as a Honeycomb query, which helps reduce false positives due to known errors.Triggers fire

This API allows you to list, create, update, and delete Triggers.

Operations

Errors

The Honeycomb API returns standardized error responses, as documented here.

Honeycomb API (1.0.0)

Auth

Boards

Burn Alerts

Columns

Datasets

Dataset Definitions

Derived Columns

Events

Authorization

Create Events

Request

Responses

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Create an Event

Request

Limits

Responses

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Environments

Key Management

Kinesis Events

Markers

Marker Settings

Queries

Query Annotations

Query Data

Recipients

SLOs

Triggers

Errors