Configure Lens services

Configure service discovery jobs, merge rules, and presentations on the Service Configuration page in Chronosphere Observability Platform so Chronosphere Lens services show the right metrics, monitors, dashboards, and SLOs. All users can view service configurations and preview changes. Only users with SysAdmin permissions can save new or edit existing service configurations.

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Before you start

To open the Service Configuration page, in the navigation menu, click Go to Admin and then select Platform > Service Configuration. Gather details about the services your teams expect to see:

• Important service names and naming patterns
• Technologies in use, such as gRPC, HTTP, Istio, or Kubernetes
• Rough count of services
• Metric sources, such as Prometheus exporters or OpenTelemetry

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Configure discovery

Discovery jobs match metrics and events to services. Follow the procedures for enablement, label mapping, and apply in that order before moving to merge rules.

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Apply staged changes

On the Service Configuration page, edits accumulate until you apply them. After each edit, click Stage changes. When a set of changes is ready, click Review & apply changes, then and then follow the procedures descrived in Preview and apply discovery. Repeat this cycle after discovery jobs, merge rules, and presentations.

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Review discovery jobs

Discovery jobs are templates that match metrics and events to a discovered service. On the Discovery jobs tab, enable jobs whose Services discovered count looks reasonable for your environment. Jobs in the Managed by column are managed by Observability Platform and aren’t editable. Create your own jobs when defaults don’t match your metric prefixes or labels, or edit or delete a job when an existing job needs changes. Don’t enable every default job at once if default label mappings don’t match your metrics.

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Customize service label mappings

When a job discovers too many or too few services, update Service mapping in the job’s edit form.

• Use Service label when the metric in Metric name already includes a service name label.
• Use Pod mapping as an advanced option when metrics lack a service label but include a pod or instance label that can join with a label in Global mappings. Review the Global mapping button on Service Configuration before pod mapping when your metrics use pod labels. Pod mapping can overmatch. Pair it with a Suppress rule when needed.

For metrics discovery jobs, optionally use Edit SLO config to map availability and latency metrics before you apply discovery changes. Label names vary across environments. The same concept might appear as pod, pod_name, kubernetes_pod_name, or k8s_pod_name. Review your metrics in Metrics Explorer before choosing a mapping.

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Preview and apply discovery

After you apply staged changes for discovery jobs, the preview uses +, -, and * for added, inactivated, and modified services. A removal can mean a service was merged, reassigned, or excluded by a rule. After you run discovery, review Configuration Status on Service Configuration for discovery job errors or conflicts.

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Clean up the service list

Discovery surfaces every name that matches your rules, including legacy naming schemes, environment suffixes, and ephemeral workloads. Use merge rules on the Merge rules tab to shape the list into the services your teams recognize. Merge rules apply from top to bottom of the list. A service matches the first rule that applies to it and won’t match additional rules. Drag rules to change their order. Create a merge rule using one of these types:

• Merge: Combine services that differ only by environment suffix. For example, merge payments-prod, payments-dev, and payments-load into payments so teams use one service page instead of separate pages per environment.
• Ignore: Exclude short-lived containers or batch jobs that change too often to keep on the list. Match the naming pattern with a regular expression in the rule’s Regex field.
• Suppress: Stop a discovery job from creating new service names while still attaching its metrics to services already on the list.

A common suppress pattern example might be where cAdvisor compute metrics have no app label, so the Compute Metrics discovery job uses namespace as the service label. That label includes many values that aren’t services. Suppress that job and list the real service names as Global Suppression Exceptions so the job only attaches metrics to services already discovered by another job. Apply staged changes after creating or editing rules.

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Configure presentations

Presentations are templates for how service data displays on a service page. Observability Platform provides default presentations in Chronosphere Managed. Create your own in Custom Presentations. When you import a dashboard, map its service variable to the lens_service derived label so panels filter to the current service. Each presentation card displays Number of Services and Number of panels. Adjust matching conditions if those counts don’t match expectations, or click a card to edit a presentation. Apply staged changes after editing presentations.

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Connect monitors, dashboards, and SLOs

After discovery and presentations are stable, connect operational resources to each service.

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Connect monitors and dashboards

On a service page, click Manage next to Dashboards or All monitors to add owned dashboards and monitors or connected resources. Owned resources affect the service’s status on the Services list. Add a Description, runbook links, and a notification policy in Edit service information.

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Create SLOs

After service pages show the metrics you want to measure, create service level objectives (SLOs). On a service page, click + Add and select SLO. The service is already selected as the owner. For queryless RPC and gRPC SLOs, burn rate alerts, and other creation paths, see Create a new SLO.

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Verify the result

To verify your changes, in the navigation menu, select System Overview > Services to open the Services list. Confirm the following:

• Service names match what your teams expect.
• The Presentations column lists the presentations attached to each service.
• Clicking a service name opens visualization panels for compute metrics, RPC metrics, and any custom presentations you configured.
• Monitors, dashboards, and SLOs appear in the sidebar and main column.

For end-user investigation workflows after setup, see Service exploration.

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Troubleshooting

If setup doesn’t look right, return to the relevant section on this page. For field-level reference, see Manage Chronosphere Lens service configuration.