Exploring observability data
OpenSearch Dashboards provides two sets of observability apps. Which set you use depends on how OpenSearch Dashboards is configured:
- Classic observability apps are available in the Observability menu in classic navigation and require no additional setup.
- Observability workspace apps are available in an Observability workspace. To use them, enable workspaces and the observability settings in
opensearch_dashboards.yml, and then create an Observability workspace. For the required settings, see Prerequisites. Application performance monitoring (APM), service-level objectives (SLOs), and agent monitoring are available only in workspaces.
The following table lists the app that you use for each task in each set.
| Task | Classic observability apps | Observability workspace apps |
|---|---|---|
| Explore logs | Event analytics | Logs |
| Explore traces | Trace analytics | Traces, Agent monitoring |
| Explore metrics | Metric analytics | Metrics |
| Monitor applications | Application analytics | Application performance monitoring, including Services, Topology map, and SLOs |
| Build dashboards | Operational panels | Dashboards |
Choosing a trace tool
Several apps display trace data. The following table describes each app and where it is available.
| App | Use it to | Where available |
|---|---|---|
| Trace analytics | View prebuilt dashboards of traces and services, including latency, error rate, and throughput, for data ingested using Data Prepper or Jaeger. | Classic navigation and Observability workspaces |
| Traces | Search and filter spans and view a single trace as a timeline of its spans. | Observability workspaces |
| Application performance monitoring | View rate, error, and duration (RED) metrics for each service and a topology map of service dependencies. | Observability workspaces |
| Agent monitoring | View the steps, tool calls, and token usage of generative AI agents. | Observability workspaces |
In an Observability workspace, APM replaces Trace analytics when APM and Discover Traces are both enabled. For the settings that enable each app, see Observability workspace apps.
For traces that OpenSearch generates for the requests it processes, see Distributed tracing.
Visualizing your data
To share visualizations with your team, add them to a dashboard. In classic navigation, use operational panels, and in an Observability workspace, add them to dashboards from the Logs page. To combine visualizations, queries, and text into reports and runbooks, use Notebooks, which are available in both classic navigation and Observability workspaces.