Full-stack observability provider Honeycomb.io has raised $50 million in Series D funding. The round was led by venture capital firm Headline, with participation from existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Storm Ventures and Industry Ventures.

The funding will be used to accelerate Honeycomb’s growth and expand its product offerings, and the company plans to hire more engineers, open new offices and invest in research and development.

“This was a preemptive round driven by the level of interest in observability that hit new heights last year — between Gartner’s Magic Quadrant naming us as a leader and our O’Reilly book being released, Observability Engineering,” said Christine Yen (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Honeycomb.

Yen spoke with theCUBE’s industry analyst John Furrier, during a CUBE Conversation from SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the accelerated pace of observability and how OpenTelemetry is evolving in the open-source community.

Observability hits a rapid pace

Honeycomb provides a platform that helps engineers understand, debug and improve production systems. The platform collects telemetry data from applications and services and provides engineers with tools to visualize and analyze the data. This helps engineers identify and fix problems quickly while improving the performance and reliability of their systems.

Observability is a rapidly growing field, as companies increasingly adopt cloud-native architectures and microservices. Honeycomb is well-positioned to capitalize on this growth, as its platform is designed to meet the needs of modern engineering teams, according to Yen.

“It really feels like observability has finally moved from this buzzword that folks are curious about to real, established movement … people are hungry for help understanding,” Yen stated. “The tools that we’re using in building that future change quickly. And as far as observability is concerned, the tools that we then need to make sense of these new systems that we’ve built need to similarly keep up.”

The company has seen rapid growth in recent years and is now used by some of the world’s largest companies, including Airbnb Inc., Netflix Inc. and Slack Technologies LLC. Honeycomb is also a leader in the open-source community, and its open-source tracing library, OpenTelemetry, is used by millions of developers, according to Yen.

“OpenTelemetry was officially the second most active project as part of the CNCF,” she said. “The momentum around that project is really a testament to the level of interest and excitement around observability as a new way of understanding the more complex systems we keep building today.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE