Case Study: Intercom speeds up requests and reduces resource spend with Honeycomb

How Intercom sped up their busiest endpoint (by as much as 50%)

Intercom, a company that builds customer communication products, faced the challenge of identifying which parts of their service to refactor to most effectively improve user experience. They needed an observability solution, Honeycomb, to investigate performance slowness and understand how different factors and user types were affected.

Using Honeycomb, Intercom's engineers were able to pinpoint the code needing optimization and validate their improvements by comparing new and old implementations. The solution from Honeycomb resulted in a median request time drop of 10-15% and a 50% improvement at P99, significantly enhancing performance for their larger customers. This also decreased their resource spend by allowing them to reduce capacity.

Intercom

Rich Archibold

Director of Engineering