Yup! It's hard! All the things you point out are right on.
We don't have the visualizations for histograms yet (though you can chart specific percentiles), but for the reasons you mention, Honeycomb is perfectly suited to give you that kind of data. I can't say we'll get that out the door soon, but it's one of my pet most wanted features so as soon as I can convince myself it's actually more important than all the other mountain of things that need to get done, you'll get your histograms and your time over time comparisons.
I've been advocating for a heat map style presentation of histograms for a long time, but I hadn't considered the difficulty that creates when trying to show time over time. That's an interesting one to noodle on.
Thanks for articulating well the value and reasons for difficulty in implementing histograms!
We don't have the visualizations for histograms yet (though you can chart specific percentiles), but for the reasons you mention, Honeycomb is perfectly suited to give you that kind of data. I can't say we'll get that out the door soon, but it's one of my pet most wanted features so as soon as I can convince myself it's actually more important than all the other mountain of things that need to get done, you'll get your histograms and your time over time comparisons.
I've been advocating for a heat map style presentation of histograms for a long time, but I hadn't considered the difficulty that creates when trying to show time over time. That's an interesting one to noodle on.
Thanks for articulating well the value and reasons for difficulty in implementing histograms!
(bias alert - I work on Honeycomb)