Honeycomb and Embrace have launched a strategic partnership integrating Embrace's real user monitoring for mobile and web into Honeycomb's observability platform. The integration enables engineering teams to correlate frontend performance data with backend system health, addressing a longstanding gap where backend teams lacked visibility into user experiences whilst frontend developers used disparate tools. Built on OpenTelemetry, the partnership allows session data, crash signals, network insights and Core Web Vitals from mobile and web applications to flow directly into Honeycomb. This creates a unified view across the entire stack using a shared data standard. The integration is available through AWS Marketplace. Embrace customers include AllTrails, Best Buy, Ford and The New York Times. The company has raised Series B funding from NEA, Allianz, Greycroft and Eniac.

Embrace partners with Honeycomb to unite frontend performance depth with backend observability precision. partnership Here's the big news: embrace.io has launched a strategic partnership with Honeycomb to bring web and mobile RUM to the industry-leading services and infrastructure reliability platform its friends at Honeycomb are building. The reasons go deeper than the product. embrace.io built Embrace on OpenTelemetry because embrace.io believe the future of observability is open, composable, and high-fidelity. embrace.io has always believed that frontend and mobile performance and reliability aren't a separate discipline from observability, they're just the part of the system that legacy platforms didn't reach. Honeycomb has pioneered the same philosophy embrace.io has been building on at Embrace on the backend: that high-cardinality, context-rich data lets engineering teams understand systems in ways that weren't previously possible. That shared foundation, around high-fidelity data and OpenTelemetry, makes this partnership much more than a typical integration, and will help entire engineering organizations better understand highly complex systems and deliver better experiences for every user on every screen. Scattered tooling and separate workflows. Backend and reliability teams have had strong observability options for a while now. Honeycomb has led the pack with a best-in-class high-cardinality model for services observability, and a genuine commitment to OpenTelemetry. But engineers across teams kept telling embrace.io the same thing: they wanted to know what end-users were experiencing on the other side of the API call. Mobile and web developers didn't want shallow RUM tools bolted onto an expensive "all-in-one" platform that wasn't built for them, so they'd seek out point solutions with zero ties to the reliability teams. Client-side environments like mobile apps are notoriously complex to troubleshoot. The result is predictable: no shared data, duplicate investigations, and a structural disconnect between the teams who need to collaborate the most. The pain isn't subtle. An SRE gets paged at 9am on a Monday, narrows a latency spike to a specific endpoint, and then has to stop and ask: is anyone actually feeling this? They have no way to know without calling someone on the mobile team. Or, a mobile engineer sees an ANR spike on the checkout screen and spends twenty minutes trying to rule out a client bug before they can even ask for backend help. A frontend engineer watches a Core Web Vitals metric deteriorate for three weeks because it never crossed the threshold that would have paged someone (yet the users felt it). These aren't edge cases. They're the standard experience for engineering teams working on user-facing software. And they all share the same problem: the ability to get answers stops at the API boundary. What changes when the data is connected and tooling depth matches expertise. Because both platforms are built on OpenTelemetry, user telemetry from Embrace flows into Honeycomb as standard, enriched, composable data with the same format and same dimensions, queryable with the same tools. No proprietary schema, no translation layer. In practice, this changes how three kinds of engineers work: * The SRE on-call starts in Honeycomb and ends in Embrace. When a backend issue fires, Honeycomb narrows the problem to a specific service and traffic slice. From there, one click surfaces the affected real user sessions in Embrace, including who they are, how many, and what they were doing when things went wrong. That's usually enough to decide whether it's worth waking up the frontend engineering team. Honeycomb tells them the "where," Embrace tells them the "who," "how many," "what customer activities are affected," and "how bad." * An app engineer starts in Embrace and ends in Honeycomb. When a checkout flow in the app is freezing (and frustrating users), Embrace quickly shows whether the problem is on the device or somewhere upstream. If it's upstream, one click opens the matching backend trace in Honeycomb, and the engineer can hand off a specific, evidence-backed ticket instead of a hunch. * The web performance / frontend engineer loops between both. Honeycomb catches a Core Web Vitals metric drifting in the wrong direction before it crosses an alert threshold. Embrace gives per-page and per-interaction breakdowns along with Synthetic analysis. They identify a recently-shipped vendor SDK as the cause, ship a fix, and can confirm the improvement in Honeycomb within a day. What this means for composable observability, and for its AI-driven future. The handoff points work because the data is open and the philosophy is shared. The session ID in a Honeycomb span drives into Embrace where users can explore populations of affected users, and the trace ID in an Embrace network span is a link to Honeycomb where you can explore the dynamics of service behavior. The data doesn't stop at the API boundary anymore. Today's integration is the foundation, not the destination. Where embrace.io is headed is a single observability surface where any question about a service, a user, a revenue line, or a cohort on a specific device build has one place to live. That means BubbleUp running on the joint event set, SLOs that incorporate real user experience scores, and web and mobile apps treated as first-class services. Drift on either side gets cross-checked automatically before any threshold fires, and the impact gets surfaced in language that product and leadership can actually act on, not just the engineering team. Engineering teams worry less about the tooling and more about their end-users. That also matters for where AI-driven development is heading. When an AI agent can pull backend trace data from Honeycomb and jump directly to the affected user sessions in Embrace, it can traverse the full stack in one step and surface the context that tells a developer whether to page the team or close the ticket. When Honeycomb's querying capabilities and Embrace's MCP server are working together inside an agentic workflow, the on-call engineer supervises rather than assembles. The quality of that agent's answer is only as good as the data it can reach, of course. Connected data means connected reasoning, and embrace.io'll have a lot more to share on that soon. Engineering teams that have been treating web and mobile performance as separate from their observability practice can now bring it into the same workflow, the same data, and the same tools. That's the promise, and embrace.io is excited to deliver it with Honeycomb.

How to create culture at a 100% remote company. Culture is a loaded word. I could wax poetic about what culture even means for an embarrassing amount of time. When Embrace got word that embrace.io were (again) on the Forbes list of Best Startup Employers, I began thinking about its culture and how it has continued to thrive and evolve in a fully remote environment. Culture isn't about company values or flashy team building exercises, though those things certainly have a time and place. It's about the way embrace.io take those tangible representations of culture and how embrace.io choose to act with that knowledge (especially when no one else is looking). You can see glimpses of culture in the way embrace.io talk to and about each other, its customers and even its product - but to look for what you can't always see, it starts with what you can. Cultural tenets of Embrace. Embrace's company values were thoughtfully planned and, while they have been iterated on a bit since their initial inception, their core remains the same: Perspective: Seeking to understand your perspective Investing: Investing in discovering value, unprompted Honesty: Delivering brutal honesty kindly Simplest: Finding the simplest solutions by focusing on outcomes Ownership: Empowering yourself and others through solutions, not answers Dark Humor: Finding levity together, even when tackling hard problems These cultural tenets guide the way embrace.io interact with folks in its day to day, both in and out of its company. embrace.io even intentionally use these values to craft thoughtful questions during its interview process as a method to reinforce its culture as embrace.io grow. While these values may be the framework to its culture, they aren't the reason why it's special. Having words on paper is great, but the way its team lives these values is why they matter. Dark Humor is essential. My favorite example is what embrace.io call value zero: "Dark Humor". It's where you see Embrace's tenets really shine. To embrace.io, Dark Humor isn't (just) laughing at taboo jokes, but finding positivity and joy in things that may be challenging or difficult. It's no secret that being at a startup has its ups and downs, but how you weather those in your day to day as a company speaks volumes. The fact is: things don't always go right, your product will break, you will lose a sale, and you will have friction. Its ability to pull things together as a team and bring levity to the occasion wins out every time. Culture is cultivated face-to-face, even for a fully distributed company. Another clear tangible in Embrace's culture is that embrace.io love getting together. embrace.io make an concerted effort as a fully remote company to get together a few times a year as both a full company and as individual teams. Ask most anyone who has been here for more than a few months, and they can tell you a story about meeting a fellow Embracian in person. embrace.io all pause its lives for a few days each year to gather for its annual company trip, the highlight of intentional culture at Embrace. What's special about these trips isn't the cool locations embrace.io go to (like Napa, Palm Springs or Austin), it isn't the fun activities embrace.io do together (like White Water Rafting, Food Tours or Boating), and it certainly isn't the important presentations that brought embrace.io together in the first place. What's special is the interactions embrace.io get to have with each other and the connective tissue it brings to its day-to-day remote work. embrace.io all walk away from these trips with a story, a new friend - or at the very least a new-found appreciation for the person sitting on the other side of the screen. These retreats are packed to the gills with activities, team meals, and strategic bonding time. But it isn't the flashy things that make the biggest impact. Money can't buy better team building than folks from all departments working together to clean up a space and taking out the trash after a 50-person meal. These micro moments of teamwork become stories and inside jokes, and eventually, company lore that is ingrained in who embrace.io is. Is it hard work? Yes, but it's more than worth it. Each of these events is logistically unique and full of finicky details. I can sometimes find myself focused on the agenda and lost in the execution of the event. However, at every single gathering, I make myself find a moment to pause and look around the room at my coworkers. I see folks in different departments talking and laughing like they have been friends for decades (to be fair some have). I see entire teams singing karaoke songs together while ICs and VPs swap stories about first jobs over tacos. Finding these moments has brought me to tears more than once over my last eight years at Embrace. Every single person who has come through these (virtual) doors has made a positive impact on my life and this company in one way or another. Right culture + right people. The biggest danger to any company culture is its own makers. No amount of intentional culture matters if you hire or keep the wrong people. But when you hire the right people, you create a company and environment that people want to be in - one that brings out the best in people. The people then channel that same energy into their work, the product and the greater community. Embrace is lucky to have the culture it does and the incredible people that make it so. Want to join embrace.io? Victoria Stepp is the head of people operations at Embrace. She's been with the team since Embrace's early days, joining the company in 2017. Victoria prides herself on her role in shaping Embrace's company culture and maintaining its values of honesty, perspective, ownership, and more. She's been integral in fostering this culture and growing the team from its initial size of seven people to today's number of more than 80. Explore the significance of office anniversaries in fostering employee retention and engagement, as embrace.io delve into the positive impact of acknowledging and celebrating milestones, fostering a sense of belonging, and reinforcing company culture, ultimately creating a more motivated and committed workforce.