By In Honeybadger, everything is an event. Application errors, logs, telemetry data? All events. While we provide simple APM-style (Application Performance Monitoring) views on top of these events, we also give you direct access through our advanced query engine in Honeybadger Insights. You can use BadgerQL to transform and aggregate events at query time, allowing you to analyze your data and derive metrics without deploying new instrumentation.
This is a key difference between Honeybadger and less sophisticated APM and logging tools. You get a simple and elegant application monitoring tool by default, but there is also so much power under the hood.
Today, we’re building on this foundation with a new feature called Insights Alarms. Alarms allow you to combine a query (“count all slow requests in the past five minutes”) with a threshold (”when count is > 2”) and trigger alerts when the query result exceeds the threshold.
Creating an alarm from an Insights query
Every alarm starts with a BadgerQL query. For example, in a Rails app, you might count the number of slow requests using the native Active Support events that Honeybadger collects automatically:
The alarm’s state tells Honeybadger when to send alerts, which you configure with each alarm. You can also configure a timing interval (how often Honeybadger checks the alarm) and lag (the amount of time to allow for new data to arrive):
When you chart your alarm in Insights, it looks like this:
The red line is the threshold for the alarm state. The query was in an alarm state for one period in the last hour but recently recovered. Hey, your app is pretty fast!
Sending alerts for alarms
You can send alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, or any of Honeybadger’s many 3rd-party integrations—giving you incredible flexibility when notifying your team and choosing when and how to respond.
You can configure integrations when editing the alarm itself or from the Alerts & integrations page in Project settings:
Creating your first alarm
To get started, head over to the new “Alarms” tab in your Honeybadger project to create an alarm:
Check out the alarms guide in our developer docs to learn more.
An alarming offer - try Honeybadger for free
Insights Alarms are available on our Business plan, which starts at just $80/month. Sign up for a free 30-day trial to see why developers love Honeybadger's powerfully simple application monitoring.
