Bees Working Together: How ecobee’s Engineers Adopted Honeycomb

Ecobee's adoption of Honeycomb for observability began organically with engineers trialing the free tier, which eventually led to the enterprise plan as it effectively addressed the company's needs in mapping engineering efforts to user impact. Founded in 2007, Ecobee specializes in smart home devices and organizes its engineering teams in a squad model, promoting shared tools for enhanced customer experience insights. Teams initially used Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring but found limitations in these tools for performance tuning and opted for Honeycomb to gain deeper insights into system latency issues. This switch was driven by grassroots advocacy from engineers like Ray Slakinski, who highlighted the inefficiency of existing tools in resolving API latency spikes. With Honeycomb, Ecobee implemented OpenTelemetry's auto-instrumentation, which seamlessly integrated with their system, providing immediate actionable insights. The company's squads now widely use Honeycomb's features, such as Service Level Objectives (SLO), to align closely with business needs, improve incident response, and optimize performance. Ecobee credits its culture of shared service ownership and collaborative learning for the successful integration and expansion of Honeycomb across its teams, which has become an indispensable tool for operation and decision-making.