The observability provider Honeycomb has named its recent offering for private cloud — eponymously called Private Cloud. It is largely designed to accommodate the explosion of code and AI hallucinations, for which observability is increasingly required.Additionally, it is almost exclusively for AWS. That excludes, at this time, the other major hyperscalers as well as on-premises environments. OpenTelemetry also plays a major role, particularly in standardization, especially for metrics.“Our priority is meeting our customers where they are, when they need us. While our initial launch of Honeycomb Private Cloud is designed for Amazon Web Services as part of our long partnership with AWS, we anticipate demand in offering this on other cloud platforms in the future, such as Azure or GCP,” Austin Parker, head of open source for Honeycomb, told me.Gartner PerspectiveAside from Honeycomb’s private cloud being AWS-centric, its design ostensibly addresses the different challenges, criteria, and needs outlined in Gartner analysts Pankaj Prasad and Matt Crossley’s annual hype cycle report on observability and monitoring, published in July. They concluded that observability is uniquely positioned to address the challenges they outlined in their report.“IT complexity and digital transformation: The rapid pace of digital transformation, complexity of modern architectures, increasing complexity within hybrid cloud environments, AI-driven systems, and the need for improved customer experience and enhanced employee engagement require heads of I&O to manage multiple complex hybrid topologies and integrate multiple disparate monitoring solutions,” Prasad and Crossley write. “Up to 84% of current observability users struggle with the costs and complexity of their daily monitoring responsibilities. Observability is uniquely positioned to address these technology challenges.”The rise of generative AI (GenAI) is driving new use cases for observability. It accelerates automation through the creation of diagnostic summaries, automation playbooks and policy enforcement tools,” Prasad and Crossley write. “As a result, ‘AI’ is now surpassing ‘digital’ as the top technology priority for CEOs, further accelerating the adoption of observability and paving the way for more autonomous operations,” Prasad and Crossley write.Additional DetailsIn a blog post, Honeycomb’s Emily Nakashima, senior vice president, engineering, described in more detail what is on offer with Honeycomb’s introduction of Private Cloud. He described these as:1. Honeycomb-managedHoneycomb handles deployment, operations, and maintenance, including installation, upgrades, and scaling. There are two options: Honeycomb-hosted puts the installation within Honeycomb-controlled AWS infrastructure for a hands-off experience. Customer-hosted places the installation within the customer’s AWS environment. This provides control over data and network policies for regulated industries like healthcare and finance while leveraging Honeycomb’s operational expertise.2. Self-managedOrganizations with mature DevOps teams run the software entirely within their own AWS environment. Customers handle deployment and maintenance according to internal policies, while Honeycomb provides support and upgrade guidance. This is intended for air-gapped or highly secure environments requiring total infrastructure control.3. Tenancy and AIBoth models offer single-tenant setups for strict isolation or multitenant setups for logical separation between business units. Honeycomb Private Cloud includes AI features such as Canvas for natural-language telemetry exploration and MCP for automated anomaly detection via heatmaps and histograms.4. Compliance and SecurityThe platform meets GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type II, and CSA STAR Level 1 standards. Customers choose between U.S., European, and APAC AWS Regions for data residency. Security measures include audit logging, penetration testing, and regular reviews of AWS partner infrastructure.Huge Strides in 2025OpenTelemetry (OTel) has made huge strides in 2025, becoming more accessible not only across different programming languages, but also across metrics, logs and now traces. Thanks to standardization, the entry threshold has been significantly lowered, which is why we are seeing a number of new and growing observability players offering their solutions.Working with OpenTelemetry and improving upon the experience with it are key, as Honeycomb — as well as observability providers that wish to remain contenders, I would argue — has realized. “We continue to invest heavily in OpenTelemetry as we’re seeing our largest and most successful enterprise customers adopting it across their applications, including our new OpenTelemetry-native metrics product, the first of its kind in the observability space,” Parker said. “AI is changing the world, and Honeycomb is providing observability for the workloads of today — and tomorrow.”The post Honeycomb’s ‘Private Cloud’ Is Largely About OpenTelemetry, AI and AWS appeared first on The New Stack.