Observe your telemetry data

Chronosphere Lens (opens in a new tab) gives you visibility into the health and performance of your applications by ingesting metrics, traces, and change events that you can observe using services and dashboards.

Use Chronosphere Lens to review services and visually examine trends in telemetry data at a high level. Dashboards help visualize data in more specific and custom ways. Incorporate dashboards into your services to tie your data together in ways that make sense for your observability teams and reduce time to mitigate.

Services

Services pages provide opinionated displays of telemetry data that are the most important to your organization. Chronosphere Observability Platform discovers services automatically and provides efficient views into your app services to help you discover ways to explore your data.

Service pages take advantage of other Observability Platform features, including tagged metrics, queries, data visualization panels, teams, collections, and change events.

Use pinned scopes to narrow your observed data, and to keep filtering based on that scope as you navigate Observability Platform to triage problems.

Dashboards

Chronosphere Observability Platform dashboards target use cases relevant to service and app monitoring. Analyze your telemetry data by creating visualizations of query results that you can customize, filter, and focus within a dashboard. Use this information to identify and act on trends, correlate changes in data to incidents, and monitor microservice statuses in real time.

Observability Platform provides a group of predefined dashboards, and the ability to create and customize dashboards tailored to the specific needs of your organization and the teams within it.

If your organization purchased change event tracking and distributed tracing, you can overlay additional telemetry data on your dashboards to help expedite problem resolution:

• Enable change events in dashboards to display change events as a lined annotation on your dashboard panels.
• Query traces directly from a dashboard, which lets you search your trace data without having to navigate to Trace Explorer.

Change events

Change events describe changes within your environment or Observability Platform tenant at a specific time so you can answer questions like When did a particular service deploy last? or Which alerts triggered in the last week? Enable change events to overlay them on other areas of Observability Platform, such as lined annotations on dashboard panels. This ability to identify and isolate change events can help remediate issues faster and minimize downstream impacts.

You can then filter change events during on-call triage to understand what changes occurred prior to the onset of an issue.

Working together

When you’re getting started using Observability Platform, your workflow might look something like:

1. In the navigation menu select System Overview > Services.
2. Identify an interesting trend or incident.
3. Explore panels in the service to display queries behind a data visualization.
4. Create a dashboard and add those queries to new panels.
5. Edit the queries and tailor the visualizations to your needs.

As you get better at identifying trends and incidents, you can turn those queries and understanding of your telemetry data into monitors and alerts, reducing on-call escalations and incidents.