Honeycomb Practitioner
What am I going to learn in this learning path?
You and your team want to understand not just what’s happening in your systems, but why it’s happening—so you can resolve issues quickly, improve reliability, and deliver better customer experiences. To do that, you need to know how to navigate Honeycomb, explore your data, and connect telemetry to meaningful outcomes.
The Honeycomb Practitioner learning path teaches you the core skills every Honeycomb user needs. You’ll learn how to move confidently through the Honeycomb interface, apply the core analysis loop to ask and answer questions about your systems, troubleshoot real-world issues, and define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to measure and improve reliability. By the end, you’ll be able to use Honeycomb not just to observe your systems, but to drive better engineering and business outcomes.
How will I learn these things?
This learning path is made up of multiple courses that combine:
Videos that explain concepts and demonstrate workflows in Honeycomb.
Hands-on labs where you’ll practice exploring traces, analyzing data, and working with SLOs.
Knowledge checks and quizzes to reinforce your learning and give you confidence in applying what you’ve learned.
Together, these courses provide a structured way to become proficient with Honeycomb and build habits you can apply directly to your team’s systems.
What do I need before taking this learning path to be successful?
A general understanding of what observability is.
An intermediate understanding of—and, ideally, some experience with—modern software systems and application development.
Alerting with Honeycomb
What am I going to learn in this learning path?
You and your team want to know when something important changes in your system—before it impacts users. Whether it’s an error spike, a performance regression, or a reliability issue, timely alerts help you respond quickly and effectively. Honeycomb provides powerful tools for proactive alerting that go beyond traditional monitoring, helping you focus on what truly matters.
The Alerting with Honeycomb learning path teaches you how to set up alerts that drive meaningful action. You’ll learn how to use triggers to get notified about unexpected changes in your telemetry data and how to define and alert on Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to keep reliability aligned with user expectations. By the end, you’ll know how to design alerting strategies that minimize noise, surface real problems, and empower your team to respond with confidence.
How will I learn these things?
This learning path is made up of two courses—Triggers and SLOs—that combine:
Videos that explain alerting concepts and demonstrate how to configure them in Honeycomb.
Hands-on labs where you’ll practice setting up triggers and creating actionable SLOs.
Knowledge checks and quizzes to reinforce your understanding and ensure you can apply these skills in your own environment.
Together, these courses give you both the conceptual framework and practical experience to build effective alerting with Honeycomb.
What do I need before taking this learning path to be successful?
A general understanding of observability concepts.
Familiarity with navigating Honeycomb and using its core features.
OpenTelemetry Practitioner
What am I going to learn in this learning path?
You and your software teams want to know what's really going on inside of your systems—you want to ask questions about your system state. To ask (and answer) these questions, you need telemetry data, which requires you to instrument your software. At Honeycomb, we like to do this with OpenTelemetry, an open-source project that helps you instrument and collect data.
This learning path guides you through the foundational concepts of OpenTelemetry and the procedural implementation of instrumentation for OpenTelemetry Java.
How will I learn these things?
This learning path consists of two courses: OpenTelemetry Foundations and Instrumentation for OpenTelemetry Java. These courses consist of:
- Videos that explain concepts and explain/demonstrate examples of mechanisms.
- Labs and quizzes that you the opportunity to test your knowledge.
This learning path features a course that teaches you to instrument a Java application. If your system is in a different language, you can use this course as a guiding framework for instrumentation. For language-specific instrumentation, visit https://opentelemetry.io/docs/zero-code/.
What do I need before taking this learning path to be successful?
- A general understanding of what observability is.
- An intermediate understanding of—and, perhaps, some experience with—how modern software systems work.
Data Strategist
What am I going to learn in this learning path?
You and your team want to make the most of the data flowing through Honeycomb—capturing the right signals, reducing noise, and shaping telemetry pipelines to fit your goals. Observability isn’t just about collecting data; it’s about designing pipelines that deliver the insights you need, when you need them, at the right cost.
The Data Strategist learning path gives you the skills to understand and control your Honeycomb telemetry pipeline. You’ll start with a conceptual introduction to how telemetry flows through Honeycomb, then learn how to manage data with Refinery, use Enhance and rehydration from archives to enrich or restore data, and build and manage pipelines directly in the Honeycomb UI. By the end, you’ll know how to design data strategies that balance cost, performance, and observability value.
How will I learn these things?
This learning path is made up of multiple courses that combine:
Videos that explain key concepts in the telemetry pipeline and demonstrate Honeycomb features.
Hands-on labs where you’ll practice configuring Refinery, rehydrating data, and building pipelines in the Honeycomb UI.
Knowledge checks and quizzes to reinforce your understanding and ensure you can apply these strategies in your own environment.
Together, these courses will equip you to design, manage, and optimize your observability data pipelines with Honeycomb.
What do I need before taking this learning path to be successful?
A general understanding of observability concepts.
Experience navigating Honeycomb and working with traces.