Introduction
Hey there, I'm Anthony, a solution engineer at StackStates. And in this video, I'm going to show you step-by-step, how easy it is to get started with StackState's cloud observability platform. And I'm quickly gonna run you through today, a quick introduction to StackState's user interface. And how we can get started.
Integrate with AWS and Kubernetes (0:31)
So, as you can see here, I've already got a bunch of stuff that's been pre-discovered. I've got problems, I've got events coming in and I've already got topology running. And I can access this from the explore tab here on the left, under explore mode, but let's jump into a little bit on how we can get started and how we get to this view. The first thing you're gonna wanna do is you wanna go to our StackPacks. And integrations are kind of like the lifeblood, I should say, of StackState. And I've already got a few set up here within my environment. I've got AWS set up with my Access key ID, AWS secret access key. And I have a role already predefined.
We actually have a bunch of information in terms of how you can uninstall, but then how you can troubleshoot, as well as what are the different types of data that we retrieve from AWS in this instance? So I've already got that set up and I'm already available to pull in all the data from AWS. I also did the same thing with Kubernetes. And so with our Kubernetes agents, you really just need to use a helm command to actually deploy the StackState agent and the cluster agent. And then as soon as you deploy that, the information just comes straight back into StackStates. I think that's everything I've got set up. I've only got two integrations. So one with Kubernetes and one with AWS.
Use the explore modes tab to get a full overview of your entire topology (2:21)
As soon as that information starts coming in I can just simply go here to the explore modes tab. And within 10 or 15 minutes, I should start to get all of the topology seamlessly from both AWS over here on the left, as well as my agents, wherever they may be deployed. And then ultimately as well, that Kubernetes environment too. With all of the different relationships and, you know, what's going on between all of the different environments without needing to do any additional configuration.
Look at specific components within your environment (3:00)
What has also been set up by default, is if I go here to views and all views, you can look at very specific components within the environment, whether it's AWS, whether it's Kubernetes. And I've actually got a few here that I've created, which are custom views. In this case here, I've got like an e-commerce app set up, which is in Kubernetes that allows me to access various subsections of the app. If we go here on the left, we can do things like event handlers. So I can do things like set up a notification to Slack if something happens or I can create an incident within service now to alert me that there's an issue.
I can apply different filters. We have both the basic and an advanced filter mode. So you can actually use our custom querying language to build out your own complex queries if you want. However, we do have a more simplified version for people who don't want to create custom queries. You can also identify which component types you wanna see within the view to help simplify it. But then we also have a bunch of visualization settings that are aligned to our root cause analysis engine. In other words, our problem identification component. We can choose to organize components by layers. So whether it's processes, containers and services or domains, as we've got in this view here. And you can choose to group things to your heart's content, as well as showing direct and indirect relationships as we can see here within that view.
Travel back in time in your topology (4:55)
On the bottom, we have the notion of being able to view the topology. You can choose whether you want to view it over the last hour, the last seven days, the last 30 days. And so with Kubernetes, especially, we can then identify what services we're running when, when things were looking good and the associated events with them. And then we can also go live to actually see in real time the subsection of the view that I have.
View problems, events and other (golden) signals (5:29)
On here on the right, we can see things like problems that have been identified specifically for what I have here in my typology, as well as events that are happening within the system, because obviously our agent is picking up various activities from the cluster. All of that is just natively going to be available here on the right-hand side. If I wanna have a more traditional view from an event management standpoint, I can simply view all events as they happen in real time. I can also view things like telemetry, because obviously we're picking out all those signals and we're building out these graphs so that I can actually track those golden signals if you will, in terms of throughput, whether something's happening within the environment or not. And then if I've got tracing enabled, I can also have traces here too. That's really everything I wanted to go through.
Enable the autonomous anomaly detector and other add-ons (6:32)
If you wanna do things like add ons, you can literally just enable our autonomous anomaly detector, no configuration required outside of just enabling it. We also have additional settings. So if you have issues with your typology or your telemetry or the data isn't coming in correctly, we do provide a complete capability so that you can create your settings. You can import and export those settings. So you can migrate from sub production to production, as well as setting up any kind of mirror sources. So like Prometheus's AzureMetrics, CloudWatch, whatever it may be, you can set those up here as well. And then finally you have our complete command line interface capability. So if you wanna actually extract data from the StackState database, you can use the StackState CLI to pull the data, and you will find your very own custom API token for that here, as well as links to documentation and things to help you on your way.
That was it. I hope you enjoyed this very brief overview of the platform. As you can see, it's super easy to get started. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us, that's info@stackstate.com. Or if you'd like to get a personalized demo from me or one of my colleagues, you can schedule a demo.
