Observability
"Born with Eyes." — Every A.R.C. platform ships with enterprise-grade observability from day one.
Overview
A.R.C. provides a complete, pre-configured observability stack. When you enable the observability feature flag, six services activate to give you full visibility into your platform:
Your Services
│
▼
Black Widow (OpenTelemetry Collector)
│
├──→ Dr. House (Prometheus) ──→ Metrics
├──→ Watson (Loki) ←── Hermes (Promtail) ──→ Logs
└──→ Columbo (Jaeger/Tempo) ──→ Traces
│
▼
Friday (Grafana)
"The Single Pane of Glass"
The Observability Stack
| Service | Codename | Role |
|---|---|---|
| OpenTelemetry Collector | Black Widow | The single entry point for all telemetry signals |
| Prometheus | Dr. House | Metrics collection and alerting — "It's never DNS" |
| Loki | Watson | Log aggregation — writes down every detail for later |
| Jaeger/Tempo | Columbo | Distributed tracing — "Just one more thing" |
| Grafana | Friday | Unified dashboards — the visual interface for everything |
| Promtail | Hermes | Log shipping — delivers logs from containers to Watson |
Enabling Observability
In your arc.yaml:
features:
observability: true
Then run:
arc workspace run
Resource impact: +4GB RAM, +2 CPU cores (6 additional services).
Key Dashboards
Once enabled, access Friday (Grafana) at http://localhost:3000:
- Service Health: Overview of all service status and uptime
- Request Tracing: End-to-end request paths across services
- Log Explorer: Search and filter logs from all services
- Metrics Explorer: Custom queries against all collected metrics
The Three Pillars
A.R.C. implements all three pillars of observability:
- Logs (Watson) — What happened, in detail
- Metrics (Dr. House) — How the system is performing, numerically
- Traces (Columbo) — How requests flow through services
- Dashboards (Friday) — Unified visualization of all signals
Explore each component in detail using the sidebar.