Honeycomb and Embrace Unite to Create a Full-Stack Observability Picture

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – May 14, 2026 – Observability platform Honeycomb and user-focused monitoring firm Embrace today announced a strategic partnership, integrating their technologies to provide a single, unified view of system health from the backend infrastructure to the end-user's screen. The collaboration seamlessly channels Embrace's mobile and web Real User Monitoring (RUM) data into Honeycomb's platform, aiming to dissolve the long-standing data silos that have separated engineering teams and obscured the true impact of system performance on user experience.

This move addresses a critical pain point in modern software development, where backend teams have historically operated with different tools and data sets than their frontend and mobile counterparts, leading to diagnostic blind spots and slower problem resolution.

Breaking Down the Data Silos

For years, the world of software monitoring has been fractured. Site reliability engineers (SREs) and platform teams have leveraged powerful tools like Honeycomb for deep insights into server health, latency, and distributed traces within complex backend systems. Simultaneously, frontend and mobile developers, responsible for the application layer that users directly interact with, have often been left with a disparate collection of tools to diagnose crashes, rendering issues, and network problems on countless devices and browsers.

This separation creates significant operational friction. When a user reports a slow app, the root cause could lie in a backend service, a network API call, or client-side rendering code. Without a shared, correlated data source, engineering teams can waste valuable time trying to pinpoint the source of the problem, often leading to a culture of finger-pointing rather than collaborative problem-solving.

The partnership between Honeycomb and Embrace is designed to dismantle these walls. By surfacing frontend session data, crash signals, Core Web Vitals, and other real user context from Embrace directly within the Honeycomb platform, the entire engineering organization gains a holistic perspective.

"We've always believed observability is a practice, not a product category," said Matt Nelson, Chief Revenue Officer at Honeycomb, in the official announcement. "Embrace has applied that same rigorous, data-driven approach to the layer where users experience software... SRE and platform teams can finally see the whole system, not just the parts they already owned." Nelson emphasized that this is "a real integration, not a dashboard mashup," a distinction made possible by a shared technical foundation.

The Unifying Force of OpenTelemetry

The key enabler of this deep integration is OpenTelemetry (OTel), the open-source observability framework that has rapidly become the industry's de facto standard. Both Honeycomb and Embrace have built their platforms on OTel, meaning their data speaks the same language natively. This eliminates the need for proprietary agents or complex data translation layers that often plague integrations between different vendors.

For developers and engineers, this common standard is a game-changer. Telemetry data—including traces, metrics, and logs—from a user's mobile app session can now be directly correlated with the backend service traces it generated within Honeycomb. An engineer can follow a single user's journey from a button tap on their phone, through multiple microservices in the cloud, and back, all within a single, coherent view.

This shared foundation reflects a major shift in the observability market, which is moving away from closed, proprietary ecosystems toward open, interoperable solutions. As complex systems become the norm, companies are prioritizing flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in.

"We built Embrace on OpenTelemetry because we believe the future of understanding complex systems is open, composable, and context-rich," stated Andrew Tunall, President and Chief Product Officer at Embrace. "When the data is standard and the philosophy is shared, the integration is real. At the end of the day, users don't care whether the root cause of an issue is service behavior, a bug, or a rendering problem, they just want your product to work."

From Technical Signals to Business Impact

The most significant promise of this unified approach is the ability to directly connect technical performance to tangible business outcomes. By combining Embrace's user-focused metrics with Honeycomb's deep system data, organizations can finally quantify how frontend degradation translates into real business impact.

For example, a product team can now ask precise questions like, "How does a 200-millisecond increase in our checkout API's latency affect mobile cart abandonment rates?" or "Which specific crash is impacting our most valuable users?" Answering these questions allows teams to prioritize bug fixes and performance enhancements based not just on technical severity, but on actual user and business impact. This data-driven approach empowers product managers, engineers, and business leaders to make more informed decisions that improve both customer satisfaction and the bottom line.

The integration makes a wealth of user-centric data available alongside backend telemetry, including aggregated insights from session timelines, network performance, and user journey context. This allows teams to move beyond simple uptime metrics and truly understand the quality of the digital experience they are delivering.

A Strategic Move in a Competitive Landscape

This partnership is also a savvy strategic maneuver in the highly competitive observability market, estimated to be worth over $4 billion in 2026. Industry giants like Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace have built their market leadership by offering monolithic, all-in-one platforms that include their own RUM solutions.

Instead of Honeycomb building a RUM product from scratch or Embrace developing a backend observability platform, this partnership represents a "best-of-breed" approach. It allows each company to focus on its core competency while delivering a tightly integrated, full-stack solution to customers. The reliance on OpenTelemetry serves as a key differentiator, appealing to organizations that have committed to open standards.

The press release notes that "key customers leveraging both products have been asking for exactly this kind of integration," validating the market demand for such a solution. By making both products available through the AWS Marketplace, the companies are also streamlining procurement and deployment for joint customers.

As software systems grow ever more complex and user expectations continue to rise, the ability to see the complete picture is no longer a luxury but a necessity. This collaboration represents a significant step toward a future where every engineer, regardless of their specialty, has the visibility needed to build and maintain exceptional digital experiences.