Observability

Alien gives you two separate views of a deployment:

deployment state   release, rollout, health, last check-in, resources
logs               application, system, AI Gateway, Encryption Gateway

Start with deployment state. Move to logs when you know which deployment or request path needs inspection.

Check deployment stateCopy Anchor Link

# All deployments in the linked project
alien status

# One deployment
alien status acme/production

# Stable output for an agent or script
alien status acme/production --json

For a safe resource summary without resource configuration or secrets:

alien deployments resources acme/production --json

For machine-based deployments:

alien deployments machines acme/production --json

Search application logsCopy Anchor Link

alien logs --deployment acme/production --since 1h
alien logs --deployment acme/production --follow
alien logs --deployment acme/production --level error --json

alien logs hides Alien system records by default. Add --system when you are debugging the platform components themselves.

Application log bodies remain application log bodies. Alien can detect common structured severity fields without replacing the body with a nested message or msg field. See Structured log severity.

Search gateway diagnosticsCopy Anchor Link

Gateway diagnostics are routing and outcome metadata. They do not contain AI prompts, AI responses, encryption plaintext, or ciphertext.

alien logs --source ai-gateway \
  --status provider-error \
  --since 24h

alien logs --source encryption-gateway \
  --operation decrypt \
  --status failed

Send telemetry to your backendCopy Anchor Link

Deployments send their telemetry to the manager: the Operator collects container logs, and your code's OpenTelemetry logs, traces and metrics go to it as well. A manager you run yourself forwards everything to one OTLP/HTTP endpoint, so it lands next to the rest of your telemetry in Datadog, Grafana, Honeycomb, Axiom, Coralogix, New Relic, or any backend that accepts OTLP. Records carry alien.deployment_id, so you can filter and alert per customer environment.

[telemetry]
otlp-endpoint = "https://api.honeycomb.io"

[telemetry.headers]
x-honeycomb-team = "your-api-key"

The manager appends /v1/logs, /v1/traces and /v1/metrics to otlp-endpoint. Use the base URL and authentication headers your backend documents for OTLP/HTTP. Some examples:

Pointing the manager at an OpenTelemetry Collector also lets you sample, redact, or fan out to several backends.

This works the same for air-gapped sites: the logs arrive when the site's report reaches your manager.

See Configuration for all settings.