AsyncAPI description of Honeycomb's event-driven and streaming-style surfaces. Honeycomb does not publish a long-lived bidirectional streaming API (no public Kafka topic, no WebSocket, no Server-Sent Events feed for query results). Instead, the platform exposes two real, production surfaces that benefit from an event-driven description: 1. Inbound OTLP ingest — OpenTelemetry Protocol over gRPC and HTTP, used by every Honeycomb-instrumented application to push traces, metrics, and logs into the platform. This is a unary request / response protocol per OTLP, not a persistent stream, but it is the primary "publish telemetry" channel for Honeycomb. 2. Outbound Trigger and SLO Burn Alert webhooks — Honeycomb posts JSON to a customer-controlled URL when a Trigger fires, recovers, or when an SLO Budget-Rate / Exhaustion-Time burn condition is met. Slack and PagerDuty are delivered via vendor-managed channels (Honeycomb Slack app, PagerDuty Events API integration key) and therefore the customer does not host an endpoint for those — they are noted here but not modelled as customer-facing channels. Transport notes (honest): - OTLP/gRPC is unary HTTP/2; AsyncAPI's "grpc" binding is a best-fit description but Honeycomb does not expose server-streaming RPCs. - OTLP/HTTP accepts both protobuf and JSON encodings on the same paths; documented header for auth is "x-honeycomb-team", and the legacy "x-honeycomb-dataset" header is only required for Honeycomb Classic environments. - Trigger webhooks are single HTTP POSTs with a 10-second response deadline; authenticity is asserted via the "X-Honeycomb-Webhook-Token" shared-secret header — Honeycomb does not document an HMAC signature scheme for outbound webhooks at this time. - "X-Honeycomb-Webhook-Delivery-ID" is supplied for at-least-once delivery deduplication; retry policy beyond the 10s timeout is not publicly documented.
OTLP/HTTP traces ingest. Spans are encoded per the OpenTelemetry protobuf schema (or JSON equivalent) inside ExportTraceServiceRequest. A 200 response indicates Honeycomb accepted the batch for processing.
v1/metrics
publishpublishOtlpMetrics
Export OpenTelemetry metrics to Honeycomb.
OTLP/HTTP metrics ingest. ExportMetricsServiceRequest in protobuf or JSON. Metrics quota is plan-dependent (see apis.yml Features).
v1/logs
publishpublishOtlpLogs
Export OpenTelemetry log records to Honeycomb.
OTLP/HTTP logs ingest. ExportLogsServiceRequest in protobuf or JSON.
OTLP/gRPC traces ingest — unary Export RPC. Use OpenTelemetry SDK gRPC exporters; no server-streaming or client-streaming variants are offered by Honeycomb.
Honeycomb POSTs to the configured webhook URL when a Trigger crosses its threshold (Status TRIGGERED) or returns to a healthy state (Status OK). The default payload is a JSON object built from the documented template variables; payload can be customised per recipient.
slo.burn_alert.budget_rate
subscribereceiveBudgetRateBurnAlert
Receive an SLO Budget-Rate burn alert webhook.
Webhook delivery for an SLO Budget-Rate burn alert (consumption over a rolling window).
slo.burn_alert.exhaustion_time
subscribereceiveExhaustionTimeBurnAlert
Receive an SLO Exhaustion-Time burn alert webhook.
Webhook delivery for an SLO Exhaustion-Time burn alert (projected time until budget is exhausted).
Messages
✉
OtlpTraces
OTLP ExportTraceServiceRequest
OpenTelemetry trace export payload.
✉
OtlpMetrics
OTLP ExportMetricsServiceRequest
OpenTelemetry metrics export payload.
✉
OtlpLogs
OTLP ExportLogsServiceRequest
OpenTelemetry logs export payload.
✉
TriggerAlert
Honeycomb Trigger Webhook
Payload Honeycomb POSTs when a Trigger fires or recovers.
✉
BudgetRateBurnAlert
SLO Budget-Rate Burn Alert Webhook
Payload for an SLO Budget-Rate burn alert.
✉
ExhaustionTimeBurnAlert
SLO Exhaustion-Time Burn Alert Webhook
Payload for an SLO Exhaustion-Time burn alert.
Servers
grpc
otlp-grpc-usapi.honeycomb.io:443
Honeycomb US OTLP/gRPC ingest. TLS on port 443. Used by OpenTelemetry SDKs and collectors configured with OTLP/gRPC exporter.
grpc
otlp-grpc-euapi.eu1.honeycomb.io:443
Honeycomb EU OTLP/gRPC ingest. TLS on port 443. Use for tenants provisioned in the EU instance.
https
otlp-http-ushttps://api.honeycomb.io
Honeycomb US OTLP/HTTP ingest. Accepts both application/x-protobuf and application/json encodings on the /v1/traces, /v1/metrics, and /v1/logs paths.
https
otlp-http-euhttps://api.eu1.honeycomb.io
Honeycomb EU OTLP/HTTP ingest. Same paths and encodings as US.
https
trigger-webhook{webhookUrl}
Customer-hosted HTTPS endpoint registered as a "Webhook" recipient on a Trigger or SLO Burn Alert. Honeycomb POSTs JSON here when the alert condition fires or recovers.