Core Concepts
Observer is built around a few key concepts that make it easy to create, manage, and customize status pages powered by metrics. Understanding these concepts will help you get the most out of Observer.
Organizations
Observer supports multiple organizations, allowing teams to manage different environments, clients, or business units separately.
- Each organization has its own status pages, metrics, and agents.
- Users can belong to multiple organizations and manage permissions accordingly.
- If your plan supports multiple organizations, you can create and switch between them from the dashboard.
Metric Definitions
Metrics define what is being monitored on your status page. Observer pulls data from Prometheus to visualize the health and performance of services.
- Metrics can be simple (e.g., "API Latency") or composite (e.g., "Uptime across regions").
- Each metric is tied to a Prometheus query (PromQL) and updates in real time.
- You can customize thresholds to determine when a service is healthy, degraded, or down.
Agents
Agents are lightweight services that fetch metrics from your infrastructure and send them to Observer.
- Agents run inside your environment, ensuring secure data collection.
- You can deploy multiple agents for redundancy or monitoring different Prometheus instances. Agents can be configured via a simple YAML file and managed through the dashboard.
Status Pages
A status page is the public-facing or internal page where your service metrics are displayed.
Status pages can be public, password-protected, or restricted to specific IPs. Each page can display multiple metrics, allowing you to group related services. You can brand and customize your page with a logo, theme, and domain.
Incidents & History
Observer automatically tracks historical data and incidents based on metric fluctuations.
Users can view past incidents and performance trends. Incidents can be manually acknowledged or updated with custom messages. Higher-tier plans allow extended data retention for compliance and auditing.
Webhooks & Notifications
Observer integrates with external tools to ensure real-time alerts and automation.
Webhooks: Send metric updates, incidents, and status changes to third-party services like Slack, PagerDuty, or custom endpoints. Notifications: Observer can notify users via email, webhooks, or integrations when services degrade or recover. Access Control & Security Observer provides flexible access controls to manage who can view and manage status pages.
Role-based access: Assign admin, editor, or viewer roles to team members.
Single Sign-On (SSO): Available for enterprise customers to streamline authentication. IP Allowlisting: Restrict access to status pages for security-sensitive environments.
Add-Ons & Customization
Observer is designed to be modular, allowing users to start with the essentials and expand as needed.
Add-ons include additional agents, organizations, extended data retention, and security features. Features like password-protected pages, IP allowlisting, and advanced branding can be unlocked based on plan selection.