Collections - Chronosphere Documentation

A collection is a group of Chronosphere Observability Platform resources, such as dashboards and monitors, associated with a service or feature you want to monitor. A team, consisting of user accounts and service accounts that share responsibility for the service or feature, is also responsible for each collection. Collections help service and feature owners manage their services at scale and streamline incident response by consolidating all relevant information about a service or feature into one place, and sharing access to that information with everyone in its responsible team. For example, to ensure that your team and on-call engineers all have full context for a service, you can create a collection for it that provides direct access to its monitors, dashboards, and the team members who can respond to incidents. Observability Platform then provides a menu of a team’s collections to its members who can quickly review resources most relevant to their services, and a homepage for the collection that the team can share with on-call engineers or other stakeholders.

View collections

Web
Chronoctl
API

To search for a collection:

Click the search bar to focus on it, or use the keyboard shortcut Control+K (Command+K on macOS).
1. Begin typing any part of the collection’s name.
2. Optional: Click the filters for all other listed resource types at the top of the search results to remove them and display only collections.
3. Click the search result you’re interested in, or use the arrow keys to select it and press Enter (Return on macOS), to select that collection.

To browse collections by their respective teams, in the navigation menu click Collections. Collections associated with teams that you belong to appear first, followed by lists of All Teams & Collections and Unowned Collections. To expand the latter lists, click the list’s expand icon.If you have administrative privileges, you can view a filterable list.

In the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then select Platform > Collections. Clicking a collection or team in this table takes you to their respective homepages.
- To filter this table by keyword, click Search collections and begin typing. The table automatically updates to display only the matching collections.
- To filter this list by teams, select them in the Select a Team dropdown.
- To display only collections that lack an owner, enable the Unowned Collections Only toggle.

You can optionally select collections by checking the checkbox on each collection’s row, which reveals an Edit Team Association button. Clicking this button allows you to select a parent team for all selected collections. If you select a team, click Save to save the edited association. For more Collection editing features, see Edit a Collection.

To view a list of all collections using Chronoctl, use the collections list command:

chronoctl collections list

This returns a list of YAML documents separated by three dashes (---), each representing a collection:

api_version: v1/config
kind: Collection
spec:
  slug: example-collection
  name: Example Collection
  team_slug: example-team
  description: Example Team - Example Collection

To complete this action with the Chronosphere API, use the ListCollections endpoint.Because the Chronosphere API requires authentication, include an API token with your curl request, as shown in the following example. For more details, see Create an API token.

export CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN="TOKEN"
export CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN="INSTANCE.chronosphere.io"

curl -H "API-Token: ${CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN}" \
     -X METHOD "https://${CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN}/ENDPOINT_PATH"

Replace the following:

TOKEN: Your API token.
INSTANCE: The subdomain name for your organization’s Observability Platform instance.
METHOD: The HTTP method to use with the request, such as GET or POST.
ENDPOINT_PATH: The specific endpoint you want to access.

Create a collection

You can use Observability Platform to create Terraform, Chronoctl, or API configurations, which you must then apply using the respective application. Collections use a slug as an identifier. Services also use a slug. Collection and service slugs can have the same value.

Web
Chronoctl
Terraform
API

To create a collection, you must have administrative privileges.

In the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then click Platform > Collections.
Click Create collection.
In the dialog that appears, enter a descriptive name in the Collection Name field. Observability Platform displays this name anywhere that it refers to this collection.
Optional: Click the Parent team dropdown and select a team to which you’re associating this collection. If the dropdown doesn’t contain any teams, you can create one.
Optional: Enter a description in the Collection Description field. Observability Platform displays this description when you view this collection’s homepage.
Click Save.

To create a collection using Chronoctl, apply a Collection resource. The resource contains these fields:

Field	Type	Description
`name`	String	The collection name as displayed in Observability Platform.
`slug`	String	Optional: A unique identifier that Observability Platform uses to identify the collection. If omitted, Observability Platform generates a slug.
`team_slug`	String	Optional: The slug of the team with which you’re associating with this collection.
`description`	String	A description displayed when viewing this collection.
`notification_policy_slug`	String	The slug of a notification policy that you’re associating with this collection.

For example, this resource creates a new collection named DBAs with the slug dbas-collection and associated with dbas-team:

api_version: v1/config
kind: Collection
spec:
  slug: dbas-collection
  name: DBAs
  team_slug: dbas-team
  description: Collection of database-related resources.
  notification_policy_slug: dbas-policy

To create the collection:

Save the Collection resource definition to a file, such as collection.yaml.

Test the changes with a dry run:

chronoctl collections create -f collection.yaml -d

Apply the changes:

chronoctl collections create -f collection.yaml

To create a collection using Terraform, use the chronosphere_collection resource type.

Field	Type	Description
`name`	String	The collection name as displayed in Observability Platform.
`slug`	String	Optional: A unique identifier that Observability Platform uses to identify the collection. If omitted, Observability Platform generates a slug.
`team_id`	String	Optional: The identifier of the team with which you’re associating with this collection.
`description`	String	A description displayed when viewing this collection.
`notification_policy_id`	String	Optional: The identifier of a notification policy that you’re associating with this collection.

For example, this resource creates a new collection that Terraform refers to as databases, names it Databases in Observability Platform, provides a description, associates the collection with a notification policy, and assigns the collection to the team dbas:

resource "chronosphere_collection" "infra" {
  name        = "Databases"
  team_id     = chronosphere_team.dbas.id
  description = "Collection of resources related to database services."
  notification_policy_id = chronosphere_notification_policy.np.id
}

To complete this action with the Chronosphere API, use the CreateCollection endpoint.Because the Chronosphere API requires authentication, include an API token with your curl request, as shown in the following example. For more details, see Create an API token.

export CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN="TOKEN"
export CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN="INSTANCE.chronosphere.io"

curl -H "API-Token: ${CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN}" \
     -X METHOD "https://${CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN}/ENDPOINT_PATH"

Replace the following:

TOKEN: Your API token.
INSTANCE: The subdomain name for your organization’s Observability Platform instance.
METHOD: The HTTP method to use with the request, such as GET or POST.
ENDPOINT_PATH: The specific endpoint you want to access.

Edit a collection

Web
Chronoctl
Terraform
API

Users can modify Terraform-managed resources only by using Terraform. Learn more.

To edit a collection, you must have administrative privileges.

In the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then select Platform > Collections.
Click the name of the collection you want to modify.
In the Collection information section, click Edit.
In the dialog that appears, edit the collection based on your needs.
Click Save.

To edit a collection using Chronoctl, modify an existing Collection resource, then apply the change.To view Collection resources as Chronoctl YAML, see View collections.

Copy the Collection resource for the collection you want to edit.
Save the collection to a file, such as collection.yml.
Modify the collection’s fields. For details, see Create a collection.

Test the changes with a dry run:

chronoctl collections create -f collection.yaml -d

Apply the changes:

chronoctl collections create -f collection.yaml

To complete this action with the Chronosphere API, use the UpdateCollection endpoint.Because the Chronosphere API requires authentication, include an API token with your curl request, as shown in the following example. For more details, see Create an API token.

export CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN="TOKEN"
export CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN="INSTANCE.chronosphere.io"

curl -H "API-Token: ${CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN}" \
     -X METHOD "https://${CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN}/ENDPOINT_PATH"

Replace the following:

TOKEN: Your API token.
INSTANCE: The subdomain name for your organization’s Observability Platform instance.
METHOD: The HTTP method to use with the request, such as GET or POST.
ENDPOINT_PATH: The specific endpoint you want to access.

Delete a collection

Before you delete a collection, you must first remove all of its monitors and dashboards. You can do this by either deleting them or moving them to other collections.

Web
Chronoctl
Terraform
API

Users can modify Terraform-managed resources only by using Terraform. Learn more.

To delete a collection, you must have administrative privileges.

In the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then select Platform > Collections.
Click the name of the collection you want to delete.
In the Collection information section, click Edit.
In the dialog that appears, click Delete collection.

Users can modify Terraform-managed resources only by using Terraform. Learn more.

To delete a collection using Chronoctl, use the collections delete command:

chronoctl collections delete SLUG

Replace SLUG with the slug for the collection you want to delete.For example, to delete a collection with the slug dbas-collection, run:

chronoctl collections delete dbas-collection

To delete a resource that’s managed by Terraform:

Edit your Terraform configuration file to remove the pre-existing resource definition.
Run this command to remove the resource from Observability Platform:
terraform apply

To complete this action with the Chronosphere API, use the DeleteCollection endpoint.Because the Chronosphere API requires authentication, include an API token with your curl request, as shown in the following example. For more details, see Create an API token.

export CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN="TOKEN"
export CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN="INSTANCE.chronosphere.io"

curl -H "API-Token: ${CHRONOSPHERE_API_TOKEN}" \
     -X METHOD "https://${CHRONOSPHERE_DOMAIN}/ENDPOINT_PATH"

Replace the following:

TOKEN: Your API token.
INSTANCE: The subdomain name for your organization’s Observability Platform instance.
METHOD: The HTTP method to use with the request, such as GET or POST.
ENDPOINT_PATH: The specific endpoint you want to access.

​View collections

​Create a collection

​Edit a collection

​Delete a collection

View collections

Create a collection

Edit a collection

Delete a collection