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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 AI’s access is read-only. It authorizes with a read scope and can query your Honeycomb data but never create, modify, or delete Triggers, SLOs, or environments.

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Before You Start

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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.
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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.
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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 a eu1 host; US accounts don’t.

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Connecting

1

Open the Honeycomb Card

Go to Configuration → AI → Connectors and click Connect on the Honeycomb card. The Connect Honeycomb dialog opens.
2

Choose Your Region

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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.
3

Authorize Rootly

Rootly redirects you to Honeycomb’s authorization screen. Sign in if prompted and grant access. Rootly requests a read-only scope.
4

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

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

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

No. Setup is a region selection plus an OAuth authorization — there’s no key to create, paste, or rotate.
No. The connector authorizes with a read-only scope. Rootly AI can query traces, metrics, logs, Triggers, and SLOs, but cannot create or modify Triggers, SLOs, or any other Honeycomb object.
One Honeycomb connection is active per team. If your data spans both regions, connect the one your incident-relevant environments live in and contact support about the other.
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.
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.

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.