Querying Metrics in Honeycomb

Metrics datasets in Honeycomb behave differently from tracing/event datasets. Operations that work on traces may fail or produce misleading results on metrics. This skill covers those differences so you construct correct, useful metrics queries.

Finding the Metrics Dataset

Metrics datasets are not identified by having "metrics" in their name. Many event datasets contain "metrics" in their slug (e.g., kafka-metrics, refinery-metrics, kubernetes-node-metrics). These are ordinary event datasets, not metrics datasets.

How to identify the real metrics dataset:

1. Call get_environment and look for rows where dataset_type = metrics. The slug is typically metrics but may differ per environment.
2. Alternatively, call get_dataset_columns on a candidate dataset — metrics datasets return a MetricInfo column showing type metadata like gauge, sum(cumulative,monotonic), or histogram(delta). Event datasets do not have this.