Basic check-ins tell you when your cron jobs and background tasks don't run on schedule. But what happens when a job runs and fails? Or takes twice as long as usual? Without more context, you won't know until the damage is done.

Check-in payloads give you the full picture:

• Exit code: Know whether your job succeeded or failed. A backup that runs but errors out is just as bad as one that doesn't run at all.
• Duration: See how long each run takes. Pair with Insights Alarms to get alerted when jobs exceed expected thresholds.
• Output capture: See what your job actually did. Stdout and stderr are captured separately, so whether it's "Deleted 42 rows" or an error message, you'll know exactly what happened.

All payload data also flows into Honeybadger Insights, where you can query it, build dashboards, and create alarms.

Getting started

The easiest way to capture payloads is with the Honeybadger CLI. Just wrap your existing command:

# Before
@hourly /path/to/backup-script.sh

# After  
@hourly hb run --id XyZZy -- /path/to/backup-script.sh

The CLI handles everything automatically: it streams output in real-time, captures stdout and stderr (up to 16KB combined), records the duration, and reports the exit code.

You can also POST payload data directly to the check-in API:

curl -X POST https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_in/XyZZy \
 -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
 -d '{"check_in": {"status": "success", "duration": 1234, "stdout": "backup completed"}}'

Use cases

• Database backups: Know if the backup completed successfully and how long it took
• Batch processing: Track how many records were processed in each run
• Report generation: Get alerted if your monthly report script starts taking too long
• Data syncs: Capture output showing how many records were synced or failed

Check-in payloads are available for Business and Enterprise accounts. See the Check-ins guide to learn more.

The Honeybadger CLI gives you command-line access to the Honeybadger API for deployments, metrics collection, and data queries. If you've been using our MCP server to integrate Honeybadger with AI agents, the CLI offers a similar feature set for direct terminal use.

With a project API key, you can report deployments and run a host metrics agent that collects CPU, RAM, and disk usage and reports them to Honeybadger Insights. With a personal auth token, you can manage projects, view errors and their affected users, and query your logs/performance data with BadgerQL.

The quickest way to install is via Homebrew:

brew install honeybadger-io/tap/honeybadger

You can also download binaries directly from the GitHub releases page or install with Go:

go install github.com/honeybadger-io/cli/cmd/hb@latest

This installs the hb command.

Check out the CLI docs for full documentation and configuration options.

Insights dashboards now support automatic refresh intervals, so you can keep an eye on live data without manually clicking the refresh button. Choose from preset intervals (30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or 15 minutes) and the dashboard widgets will update themselves in the background.

Here's how to try it:

1. Navigate to Dashboards in your Honeybadger project
2. Click the clock icon dropdown (left of the refresh button) in the toolbar
3. Select your preferred refresh interval—the button displays the current setting (e.g., "30s", "5m")

Select "Off" to disable auto-refresh at any time. For more on building and customizing dashboards, see the Insights Dashboards documentation.

When you're exploring data in Honeybadger Insights, query results often contain URLs—API endpoints, webhook URLs, referrers, and so on. Now when you click on any string value that contains a valid URL, you'll see an "open URL" option in the context menu that opens the link in a new browser tab.

Here's how to try it:

1. Go to the Insights tab in your Honeybadger project
2. Run a query that returns URL values (for example, filter startsWith(request.url::str, "https"))
3. Click on any URL in the results and select open URL from the context menu

Check out our Insights documentation to learn more about exploring your application data with BadgerQL.

Insights dashboards now include an Edit Source option that lets you view and modify the entire dashboard configuration as YAML. This makes it easier to copy dashboards between projects, share configurations with teammates, or make bulk changes without clicking through the UI.

The editor validates your YAML against a schema and displays helpful error messages if something's wrong. Stream IDs are translated to human-readable names in the source, so you can copy configurations between projects without manually updating IDs.

Here's how to try it:

1. Navigate to the Dashboards tab in your Honeybadger project
2. Click the ... dropdown menu on any dashboard
3. Select Edit source to open the YAML editor

Check out the Insights dashboards documentation to learn more.

Our documentation site now loads significantly faster with improved search capabilities—including Command-K navigation and automatic llms.txt generation that helps AI tools better understand and reference Honeybadger's docs.

We also gave the docs a light visual update:

Visit docs.honeybadger.io to see for yourself!

Need to ensure your redirects point to the right place? Want to confirm your API returns the correct content type? You can now add response header checks to your uptime monitors.

This feature lets you verify that specific HTTP response headers contain expected values—perfect for validating redirects, content types, and other critical header information.

What you can check

• Redirect targets: Verify the Location header points to the correct URL
• Content types: Ensure Content-Type contains application/json or other expected values
• Custom headers: Check any response header your application returns
• Add up to 3 header checks per monitor (all must pass for success)

Getting started

1. Navigate to your uptime monitor settings
2. Add response header checks in the configuration section
3. Specify the header name and expected value (case-sensitive)
4. Save your monitor

Available immediately for all Honeybadger accounts. Check out the docs for more details.

Traditional APM tools bury you in dashboards you'll never use. Meanwhile, the things you actually care about—such as signups, payment failures, and that one background job that keeps timing out—require complex custom instrumentation. That's backwards.

We're making it easier to build custom dashboards that adapt to your workflow. Start with smart defaults for your stack, then customize everything to track what matters most to your product and business.

The Project Overview dashboard

We added an intelligent overview dashboard to every project that we configure automatically based on your stack. Are you using Rails? You'll see Rails-specific performance metrics, including slow controller actions, queries, and response codes. Running Phoenix? Get Ecto query performance and LiveView metrics. It's a great way to get a high-level view of your project, including errors, performance, uptime checks, and more.

Honeybadger's new default Project Overview dashboard

To tie it all together, we added five new Honeybadger-specific widgets to give you quick access to:

• Errors: List your latest error reports with configurable search filters
• Uptime checks: See the status of your active uptime checks
• Check-ins: See when your cron jobs and scheduled tasks last checked in
• Deployments: List your latest app deployments
• Alarms: See your custom alerts from Honeybadger Insights

These widgets appear on the default project overview dashboard by default, but they're also available in the new widget library to add to your other dashboards a la carte.

Fast dashboard switching with recommended dashboards

You can now quickly switch between your dashboards and discover new ones with a new dropdown menu that recommends automatic dashboards for your application. If you're using Sidekiq in Ruby or Oban in Elixir, for example, you can add those dashboards to your project with one click. We currently have automatic dashboards for popular tools and frameworks in Ruby, PHP, Elixir, and Python, with more on the way.

Recommended dashboards for a Rails project in Honeybadger

You can also now change your default project dashboard and star your favorite dashboards to pin them to the top of the list. We've been using these new dashboards internally to monitor Honeybadger, and it's been a big improvement to our daily workflow.

Create custom dashboards from the widget library

Need something more unique? We also made it easier to build your own dashboards. You can now create and edit widgets without leaving the dashboard you're working on. Click any widget to expand the inline query editor, make your changes, and see the results instantly.

Honeybadger's inline widget configuration and query editor

When creating new widgets, choose from a widget library of pre-configured templates for common data sources:

• Error rates and deployments
• Database performance metrics
• Background job processing times
• Request counts and response distributions
• Cache hit rates and more

Honeybadger's drag and drop widget library

We're particularly excited about this change because as we add new automatic dashboard templates, the widget library will grow. More to come!

Getting started with dashboards

The new project overview dashboard and UI enhancements are available immediately for all Honeybadger accounts. Head on over to your Honeybadger project and click on the "Dashboards" tab to get started. For details related to your application framework, see our announcements for Ruby, Laravel, Elixir, and Python.

Honeybadger now offers automatic performance dashboards for Django, Flask, and Celery applications. Just like our Ruby, PHP, and Elixir dashboards, HB's Python performance dashboards provide instant visibility into your Python apps with zero-configuration instrumentation, plus direct access to transform, query, and alert on the underlying data.

Our Python performance monitoring builds on Honeybadger Insights to automatically capture telemetry from your applications, then presents it through curated dashboards that highlight performance trends and bottlenecks.

What's new

• Django performance dashboard: Track request performance, identify slow views, monitor Django ORM queries, and analyze response distributions—all automatically instrumented from your Django applications.
• Flask performance dashboard: Monitor routes and blueprints, track SQLAlchemy query performance, and get detailed insights into endpoint response times.
• Celery performance dashboard: Visualize background job health, track task execution times, identify slow workers, and monitor job success rates across your Celery queues.
• Zero-config instrumentation: Once you install Honeybadger in your app, the Python package automatically captures telemetry from Django, Flask, FastAPI, and Celery.

How it works

Honeybadger automatically instruments popular Python frameworks to capture detailed performance events, including HTTP requests, database queries, and background job metrics. This telemetry feeds directly into your dashboards, but you also query and analyze the raw data using BadgerQL—and even create alerts for specific events and metrics.

Getting started

If you already use Honeybadger, all you need to do is upgrade your Honeybadger Python package and enable Insights in your config. For new setup instructions, see our integration guides for Django, Flask, and other Python frameworks.

Python performance monitoring is now available for all Honeybadger accounts, with flexible usage-based pricing options. Check out the announcement blog post to learn more and see the dashboards in action.

When querying notice events in Honeybadger Insights, you can now click on the fault_id or ulid fields to jump directly to the corresponding error—making it faster to investigate issues.

Here's how to try it:

1. Navigate to the Insights tab in your Honeybadger project

2. Run this query to find the notice events:

   fields @ts, @preview
   | filter event_type::str == "notice"
   | sort @ts
   

   If you don't see events, ensure you have selected the internal stream and a sufficient time window in which errors have occurred.

3. Expand an event to view its details

4. Click the fault_id or ulid value, then Go to Error

The fault_id action links directly to the error page in Honeybadger. The ulid action links to the error page, scoped to the occurrence matching the current notice event.

This works for all notice event types and helps connect your data analysis workflow with error investigation.

See the docs to learn more about error monitoring and Honeybadger Insights.