Get started

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1. Send your data to 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

In Axiom, an individual piece of data is an event, and a dataset is a collection of related events. Datasets contain incoming event data. The Datasets tab allows you to analyze fields within your datasets. For example:

• Determine field data types and names.
• Edit field properties.
• Gain insights about the underlying data using quick charts.
• Add virtual fields.

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4. Explore 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 Query tab gives you various tools to extract insights from your data:

• Visualize aggregations with count, min, max, average, percentiles, heatmaps, and more.
• Filter events.
• Segment data with group-by.

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5. Monitor for problems

Get alerted when there are problems with your data. For example:

• A queue size is larger than acceptable limits.
• Web containers take too long to respond.
• A specific customer starts using a new feature.

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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 your organization

As your use of Axiom widens, customize it for your organization’s needs. For example:

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