Recipe

Honeycomb setup

Ship observability into Honeycomb in under 5 minutes with Meridian's OpenTelemetry-native export pipeline.

1. Grab your API key

In Honeycomb, navigate to Team Settings → API Keys and create a key with the Send Events permission.

2. Set environment variables

HONEYCOMB_API_KEY=x-abc123
HONEYCOMB_DATASET=meridian-prod
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://api.honeycomb.io

Meridian reads these at startup. No code changes required.

3. Restart your loader

Kill the running process and launch it again. Meridian will auto-detect the Honeycomb exporter and begin streaming traces and span events immediately.

4. Verify in Honeycomb

Open your dataset in Honeycomb. You should see traces flowing within 30 seconds. Look for the root span named meridian.session.init to confirm everything is wired correctly.

Pro tip: Add the Honeycomb query URL to your dashboard widgets so your team can jump straight from Meridian into a trace waterfall.

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