Get started

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1. Get your data into Axiom

You can send data to Axiom in a variety of ways. Each individual piece of data is an event.

Events can be emitted from internal or third-party services, cloud functions, containers, virtual machines (VMs), or even scripts. Events follow the JSON specification for which field types are supported, an event could look like this:

{
  "service": "api-http",
  "severity": "error",
  "duration": 231,
  "customer_id": "ghj34g32poiu4",
  "tags": ["aws-east-1", "zone-b"],
  "metadata": {
    "version": "3.1.2"
  }
}

An event must belong to a dataset which is a collection of similar events. You can have multiple datasets that help to segment your events to make them easier to query and visualize, and also aide in access control.

Axiom stores every event you send and makes it available to you for querying either by streaming logs in real-time, or by analyzing events to produce visualizations.

The underlying data store of Axiom is a time series database. This means every event is indexed with a timestamp specified at ingress or set automatically.

Axiom doesn’t sample your data on ingest or querying, unless you’ve expressly instructed it to.

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2. Stream your data

Axiom makes it really easy to view your data as it’s being ingested live. This is also referred to as “Live Stream” or “Live Tail,” and the result is having a terminal-like feel of being able to view all your events in real-time:

From the Stream tab, you can easily add filters to narrow down the results as well as save popular searches and share them with your organization members. You can also hide/show specific fields

Another useful feature of the Stream tab is to only show events in a particular time-window. This could be the last N minutes or a more-specific time range you specify manually. This feature is extremely useful when you need to closely inspect your data, allowing you to get an chronological view of every event in that time window.

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3. Analyze your data

While viewing individual events can be very useful, at scale and for general monitoring and observability, it’s important to be able to quickly aggregate, filter, and segment your data. The Analytics page lets you do just that, and more:

The Datasets tab gives you various tools to extract insights from a dataset:

• Visualizing aggregations with count, min, max, average, percentiles, heatmaps, and more
• Filtering events with and/or grouped filters containing one or more field filters
• Segment data with group-by

You can control the time range of your search, and even compare your results to a previous point-in-time using the Against feature. Queries are rounded off with support for time resolution, ordering, and limits.

Any query you create can be saved as well as easily sharable with your team.

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4. Explore your data

Axiom Processing Language enhanced data exploration capabilities allows users to write powerful queries to explore, analyze, and visualize large queries in real-time.

By writing targeted queries with APL, you can swiftly identify and diagnose issues, reducing downtime and minimizing the impact on your business operations. APL’s ability to analyze logs and data in real-time allows you to stay on top of potential problems and address them before they escalate.

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5. Monitor for problems

Get alerted when there are problems with your data, such as

• A queue size is larger than acceptable limits
• Web containers are taking too long to respond
• A specific customer has started using a new feature
• etc, etc

Axiom alerting consists of two key concepts:

1. Monitors that run in the background querying your data on a frequency and checking whether a threshold has been reached to trigger the monitor, and
2. Notifiers which encapsulate how to alert a person, a team, or a service that a monitor has been triggered.

Monitors are configured with the following:

• Query
• Frequency is how often the monitor runs
• Interval is the time range of data that the monitor queries
• Threshold is the value where the monitor triggers
• One or more notifiers that specify how to alert you when the monitor is triggered

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6. Integrate with data shippers

Integrations can be installed and configured using different third-party Data shippers to quickly get insights from your logs and services by setting up a background task that continuously synchronizes events into Axiom.

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7. Customize for your organization

As your use of Axiom widens, you can customize it for your organization’s needs:

• Add users
• Set up third-party authentication providers
• Set up role-based access control
• Create and manage API tokens