Case Study: Carwow resolves performance issues and blocks attacks with Honeycomb

Preventing Bad Actors from Spoiling the Show at carwow

Carwow, an online marketplace connecting car dealers and buyers, needed better observability as it expanded across regions on Heroku with Rails, microservices-lite apps, and Kafka. Its existing monitoring, including New Relic, could show that some endpoints were slow or erroring, but not which specific requests or users were causing the problem.

With Honeycomb, Carwow could drill into high-cardinality data like IP address and trace request activity end to end to pinpoint the exact source of slowness. Honeycomb helped the team uncover a set of malicious SQL injection attempts coming from a single IP, block the attack, and quickly restore performance for customers—solving an issue their previous tools couldn’t isolate.

Carwow

Mike Wagg

Technical Director