Honeycomb · JSON Structure

Honeycomb Event Structure

JSON Structure for a single Honeycomb event row. Events are arbitrary flat JSON objects with high-cardinality string, number, and boolean attributes. OpenTelemetry attributes are encoded with their canonical dot-separated names.

Type: object Properties: 18
ObservabilityTracingDistributed TracingTelemetryOpenTelemetryEventsLogsMetricsSLOAIOpsAI Observability

Honeycomb Event Structure is a JSON Structure definition published by Honeycomb, describing 18 properties. It conforms to the https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema meta-schema.

Properties

service.name trace.trace_id trace.span_id trace.parent_id name duration_ms status_code error http.method http.target http.status_code http.route db.system db.statement rpc.system rpc.service rpc.method user.id

Meta-schema: https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema

JSON Structure

Raw ↑ 
{
  "$schema": "https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema",
  "$id": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/honeycomb-io/main/json-structure/honeycomb-event-structure.json",
  "title": "Honeycomb Event",
  "description": "JSON Structure for a single Honeycomb event row. Events are arbitrary flat JSON objects with high-cardinality string, number, and boolean attributes. OpenTelemetry attributes are encoded with their canonical dot-separated names.",
  "type": "object",
  "additionalProperties": true,
  "properties": {
    "service.name": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "OTel service.name resource attribute. Maps the event to a Honeycomb dataset."
    },
    "trace.trace_id": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Trace identifier shared by all spans in a single trace."
    },
    "trace.span_id": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Unique identifier for this span."
    },
    "trace.parent_id": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Parent span identifier. Empty for root spans."
    },
    "name": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Span name; corresponds to OTel span.name."
    },
    "duration_ms": {
      "type": "number",
      "description": "Span duration in milliseconds. Honeycomb's canonical latency field."
    },
    "status_code": {
      "type": "integer",
      "description": "Span status (0 unset, 1 ok, 2 error) per OTel."
    },
    "error": {
      "type": "boolean",
      "description": "Set to true when the span represents an error. Drives Honeycomb error highlighting."
    },
    "http.method":      { "type": "string" },
    "http.target":      { "type": "string" },
    "http.status_code": { "type": "integer" },
    "http.route":       { "type": "string" },
    "db.system":        { "type": "string" },
    "db.statement":     { "type": "string" },
    "rpc.system":       { "type": "string" },
    "rpc.service":      { "type": "string" },
    "rpc.method":       { "type": "string" },
    "user.id":          { "type": "string" }
  }
}