Honeycomb vs. Dynatrace
See why teams are making the switch from Dynatrace to Honeycomb, and decide if we’re the best choice for you.
Key differences
Own your data
Dynatrace’s proprietary OneAgent takes ownership of your telemetry context. Honeycomb is built for OpenTelemetry from the ground up. Your instrumentation stays yours.
Explore beyond the algorithm
When Davis AI doesn’t have the answer, Dynatrace leaves engineers without a path forward. Honeycomb Intelligence puts the power of exploration in your hands: query any dimension, any time, on raw event data.
Predictable costs, no surprises
Dynatrace’s multi-vector pricing (host count, memory, data units, query charges) makes costs unpredictable as you grow. Honeycomb charges simply by event volume, with unlimited seats, fields, and queries included.
Dive into the details
What sets Honeycomb apart from Dynatrace? Take a closer look at how the two tools compare.
 |  |
|---|---|
| One single source of truth | |
Wide events unify context (traces, logs, metrics) on a singular debugging workflow. | Separates observability signals across multiple views (infrastructure, applications, logs, and user sessions) requiring context-switching and slowing root cause analysis. |
| Real-time querying and pattern detection | |
Performs complex queries in real-time across all fields instantly, without prior selection of indices. | Relies on heavily sampled telemetry and pre-built dashboards that introduce blind spots. |
| Unrestricted analysis and parsing of highly specific values | |
Fast analysis with unlimited cardinality and high dimensionality. | Warns against high-cardinality data and relies on heavy pre-aggregation and sampling. Tags must be limited, restricting your ability to drill into the specific values that matter most during an incident. |
| Faster debugging and anomaly analysis | |
Detects hidden outliers across any attributes with AI BubbleUp anomaly detection. | Davis AI automatically flags anomalies in monitored metrics, but engineers have no mechanism to explore the raw data behind those signals or investigate dimensions the AI hasn’t been configured to watch. |
| Actionable alerts with SLOs | |
Raw event-based SLOs give teams insight into the underlying “why.” | Offers SLOs but provides no debuggable view or click-through to underlying raw event data, making it difficult to understand what is actually causing an SLO breach or quantify its user impact. |
| Real user monitoring | |
Honeycomb and Embrace have partnered to connect frontend user experience data with backend system observability. | Offers strong RUM dashboards for modern architectures including SPAs and async rendering, but frontend data lives in a separate silo from backend telemetry, limiting end-to-end correlation. |
| Full compatibility with OpenTelemetry | |
All features built for OpenTelemetry. Own your instrumentation and avoid vendor lock-in. | Can ingest OpenTelemetry data but does not connect it to the full product. Pushes customers toward installing OneAgent, at which point Dynatrace takes ownership of all instrumentation context your team has built. |
| Long retention on debugging data | |
60 days of default retention for all real-time debugging data. | Retention policies vary by data type and SKU. Detailed trace and log data is often retained for shorter periods by default, with longer retention requiring additional cost tiers. |
| Pricing for inclusion of contextual data to prepare for any unknowns | |
Pay by event volume, not by seats, servers, bytes, or fields. Capture unlimited custom attributes. | Pricing spans multiple vectors: host count, memory per host, data units, RUM units, and per-GB query charges. A low advertised ingest cost masks a much higher total cost of ownership as infrastructure and data volumes grow. |
| No peak usage billing for data | |
Customers receive burst protection for unexpected spikes. | Host-based pricing means traffic spikes and infrastructure scaling events translate directly into unpredictable cost increases, making budgeting difficult during incidents or growth periods. |
| AI-powered querying capabilities to facilitate engineer adoption | |
Query Assistant enables engineers to ask questions in plain English and explore unfamiliar data. | Davis AI automates insight generation and Dynatrace Intelligence provides domain-specific agents for SRE and DevOps workflows. However, engineers remain dependent on the AI’s conclusions and cannot freely query raw event data when the AI falls short. |
| Out-of-the-box integrations | |
Plugs into all major cloud infra, and inherits the entire OpenTelemetry ecosystem. MCP Server support (GA since May 2025) enables AI assistants to access live production insights. | Deep integrations with AWS, Azure, GCP, ServiceNow, and a broad ecosystem of enterprise tools. |
Migration made easy
Making the switch to Honeycomb is stress-free. In fact, we’ll be here to make it all as effortless, seamless, and painless as possible.
Docs
Read everything you need to know for getting started with Honeycomb.
Resources
Dive into our resources for help observing, debugging, and improving your systems.
Customer support
Our team of support engineers is on deck as your trusted partner in observability.
What our customers say
After years in engineering feeling like I was missing critical insights, with our switch to Honeycomb, suddenly, it’s like I have sight for the first time in my career.
Pawel Malon
Principal Software Engineer, Phorest
We rely on Honeycomb to provide the world-class scale and resilience LaunchDarkly customers expect.
Edith Harbaugh
Co-founder and CEO, LaunchDarkly
We’re able to bring a different mentality in the way we run and manage our production systems. We were able to really help our engineering teams and change the culture.
Rich Anakor
Chief Solutions Architect, Vanguard
People ask, ‘Where’s Honeycomb in the new architecture?’ The answer is it’s everywhere. It’s built in.
Nick Herring
Technical Director of Infrastructure, CCP Games
We have predictable pricing that lets us do away with the legacy approach of sampling logs to preserve budget. Honeycomb’s event-based pricing empowers us to see every request from every service that comes through.
Michael Garski
Director of Platform Engineering, Fender
