About the Observability page

The Observability page allows you to monitor Fastly Deliver and Compute services via collections of metrics and logs.

Before you begin

About the Observability page

When you access the Observability page, the Account Summary tab appears by default. This tab contains the Account Summary dashboard, which provides a high-level overview of all your services. You can view additional dashboards by navigating to other Observability tabs. The Observability tabs are as follows:

• Account Summary: provides a high-level overview of all your services.
• Logs: gives you access the access to the Compute log tailing feature, which allows you to view custom log messages from your Compute application.
• Services: displays top metrics for a Fastly service or aggregated metrics all of your services.
• Origins: provides real-time and historic visibility into detailed response data for traffic from your origin servers to Fastly. Origin Inspector must be enabled.
• Domains: provides real-time and historic visibility into detailed response data for traffic from your domains and subdomains to Fastly. Domain Inspector must be enabled.
• Dashboards: allows you to view and manage custom dashboards that surface relevant metrics for a Fastly service. This tab also provides access to the Image Optimizer, WebSockets, and Fanout dashboards.
• Real-time: displays stats information that allows you to monitor cache activity for your Deliver and Compute services. This tab also provides access to real-time Origin Inspector and Domain Inspector stats.
• Historic: displays historical stats derived from your Deliver and Compute services. This tab also provides access to historical Origin Inspector and Domain Inspector stats.

The exact graphs displayed on the tabs depend on your access permissions and the type of service you create, as well as other products and features you may have purchased.

The data on the Observability page may also appear grayed out or blank to some users, with no information displayed in the controls, when a service hasn't yet received enough requests for Fastly to display meaningful information about it.

About the Account Summary dashboard

The Account Summary dashboard provides a high-level overview of all your services. It displays the following metrics in a table for each service:

• Requests: the number of requests Fastly receives for your service over time.
• Errors: the number of cache errors.
• Bandwidth: the number of bytes delivered from Fastly's servers to your website's visitors.

The table of all services allows you to:

• sort the services in the summary table by clicking the column header that you want to sort by (e.g., clicking the Requests header will list the service that received the highest number of requests first and the service that received the fewest number of requests last).
• view additional metrics for a service by clicking See more details in the row of the relevant service. The Service Overview dashboard appears.
• click the star next to services that you want to favorite. The table lists your favorite services first.

About the Observability page controls

On the Account Summary, Services, Origins, Domains, and Dashboards tab, a series of controls appear to the right of and below the dashboard name. These controls allow you to refine the displayed metrics on the dashboard. Specifically:

• the Dashboard Name menu (which only appears on dashboards for specific services, not the Account Summary dashboard) allows you to select and view a different dashboard.
• the Options menu allows you to copy a link to the dashboard, export the data from the dashboard to a CSV file, and display event markers on the charts. Event markers are vertical lines that signify when a new version of the service was activated.
• the Create dashboard button allows you to create a custom dashboard.
• the Service menu allows you to specify the service that the metrics are drawn from. From the menu, you can search for a service by ID or name.
• the Region menu allows you to limit the displayed metrics on any dashboard to a specific region around the world.
• the Data Resolution menu allows you to select how the data is represented for the defined time range.
• the Time Range menu allows you to change the timeframe over which metrics will be displayed and to change the timezone from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to the timezone identified by your browser. By default, the system displays 1 days worth of static data. The selected timeframe and timezone persist as you navigate between dashboards.
• the Live button (which only appears on dashboards for specific services, not the Account Summary dashboard), allows you to change displayed metrics to live data that changes in real time. When viewing the live data stream, you can click Pause to pause the live data stream.

You can also gain more information about a chart by hovering over any part of a graph. This displays a timestamp indicator that updates itself as you move the cursor.

On dashboards that aren't custom, you can click expand in the upper right corner of a chart to access the Metric Details page, which contains detailed information about the metric being tracked. Specifically, the page displays:

• the expanded chart.
• a summary table that automatically updates the total, maximum, minimum, and mean values for the metric based on the timestamp that you're hovering over on the expanded chart.
• a table that displays the total for the metric over time.

About the controls on the Real-time and Historic tabs

You can interact with and control graphs on the Real-time and Historic tabs as follows.

Limiting data viewed to specific data centers

By default, Real-time graphs display data from all data centers. To view data from a single, specific data center, select it from the All datacenters menu.

Disabling smooth scrolling

The Real-time graphs update continuously. Leaving the graphs open for long periods of time, however, can occasionally lead to higher CPU utilization. To improve performance, you can deselect the Smooth scrolling checkbox. The graphing animations may not be as smooth when this checkbox is deselected.

Viewing the real-time stats timestamp indicator

Hovering the cursor over any part of a graph displays a timestamp indicator that updates itself as you move the mouse.

Hiding and displaying the mean value

A dashed line indicating the mean value of the graph's data appears on some graphs. To hide the mean line, deselect the Mean checkbox.

Expanding and minimizing graph views

You can expand and minimize the view of some of the graphs using the quadruple arrow in the right-hand corner of the graph to display an expanded view of the graph or special features it offers. Specifically:

• the Global POP Traffic heat map displays a larger view of the graph as well as the traffic in each POP region, with continuously updating data on the POP's current requests per second, the request error ratio, and the bandwidth going through that POP.
• the Requests, Errors, and Hit Ratio graphs expand to larger versions of themselves along with the already expanded versions of the Bandwidth and Origin Latency graphs.
• the Origin Latency graph specifically includes a small gear in the upper right corner that allows you to change the interval limit displayed by the graph from the default 15 second interval to a different time frame.

Viewing service version activation

Service version activations appear as vertical lines on the Historic graphs. Hovering your cursor over any line displays the version's number and its activation timestamp.

Controlling the historic stats date displayed

You can control how you view the historic stats date ranges. For all displayed graphs, you can choose:

• the exact local date and time range of the graphed data
• how often to sample the data displayed
• whether to view global data for the graphs or only data from a specific region
• how to display the statistical values

Keep in mind, however, that data won't appear yet for time periods that haven't ended. Data aggregated per day is collected based on UTC days and each day's data becomes available around 2am the following day. Data aggregated by hour becomes available approximately 15 minutes after the end of each hour. Data aggregated by minute usually becomes available two minutes after the end of the minute, but can take up to 15 minutes. When the most recent data for the collected time range hasn't been aggregated yet, the graphs display a drop in traffic at the end of the depicted time span. If your use case requires data closer to real-time, consider using the real-time stats instead.

Changing the stats displayed in historical graphs

You can change the statistics displayed in any historical graph to display an average, a 95th percentile, a minimum, a maximum, or a total. When set to average, the graph displays the average (mean) as a dashed line.

To change the statistics displayed by all historical graphs, use the Display menu in the upper right corner, as shown below.

To change the statistics displayed for a individual graph, click the menu below the graph's name, as shown below.

You can also exclude certain data entirely from some graphs. For example, in the Status 3XX Details graph, you can click Show or Hide or the corresponding color ship next to the specific 3XX errors (301, 302, etc.) to show or hide those error types, respectively.

About data latency

When working with dashboards and the metrics they display, keep the following in mind about data:

• We do not report data for time periods that have not yet ended.
• Data with day resolution is bucketed based on UTC days and each day's data becomes available around 2am the following day.
• Data with hour resolution buckets becomes available approximately 15 minutes after the end of each hour.
• Data with minute resolution buckets usually becomes available two minutes after the end of the minute, but can take up to 15 minutes to appear.

If your use case requires data closer to real-time, consider using the generally available real-time API instead.

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