Oct 14, 2026, 8:26 PMWhere I'm at in general on application telemetry — at least for Elixir Phoenix apps
1. Sentry. Very nice, straightforward Elixir integration. Gives me information about most 500 errors — e.g. problems the app knows it's having.
2. At some point I start wanting performance information and especially wanting to see what's occasionally weirdly slow. At that point: traces into Honeycomb.
3. Eventually I add metrics to the Honeycomb integration.
Oct 14, 2026, 8:29 PMIt's rare that I run any Honeycomb queries more complicated than
COUNT GROUP BY name
P99(time_in_ms) GROUP BY name
Once I have more traffic heatmaps will probably get more interesting
Oct 14, 2026, 8:31 PMUsually just those queries plus clicking into a trace on something that seems unnaturally common or unnaturally slow will produce a "haha wtf" moment and then I just go fix it
Oct 14, 2026, 8:32 PMI used to start with Honeycomb first because in theory they can handle every instrumentation need I might possibly have... but Sentry is so good at handling the specific class of problem that accounts for like 95% of what I go to telemetry for that I'v switched loyalties
Oct 14, 2026, 8:33 PMHoneycomb's pricing model is excellent for small teams, though, so there's that. I'm the only person on my team who has Sentry access and it's annoying.
That said, "Sentry seats" is probably an early item on the shopping list once StoryTime like, pays for its own accounting costs.