Getting Started with Ascent
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The Ascent platform enables you to converge all of your IT data from disparate sources, manage your telemetry data, and monitor and troubleshoot your operational data in real-time. The following guide assumes that you have signed up for Apica Ascent in the cloud. If you are not yet a registered user, please . Once registered, use this guide to get started.
For all users that want to get started with Ascent should follow these five (5) simple steps:
In this guide, we cover the key goals and related activities of each step to ensure a quick and easy setup of Ascent.
The goal is to ingest telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces) from relevant systems.
Key actions include:
Identify all sources
Choose agents appropriate for each data type
Configure data collection frequency and granularity
Ensure data normalization
Detailed steps to start ingesting data:
From the menu bar, go to: Explore -> Fleet:
With Fleet you can automate your data ingestion configuration:
You'll be directed to the Fleet landing page:
From here, you'll click "Install Agent Manager." - The Agent Manager will allow you to control and configure the OpenTelemetry Collector.
Inside the "Install Agent Manager" pop-up screen, select:
Platform: Linux
Agent Type: OpenTelemetry Collector
Then, click 'Proceed'.
You'll be redirected to the 'Fleet README' pop-up page:
You'll download and configure this configuration file to start ingesting data.
You'll download 2 files:
The README.txt contains instructions for how to install the Agent Manager and OpenTelemetry Collector.
The fleet-install.sh is a preconfigured script that you'll run on your Linux host to start ingesting data into Ascent automatically:
On your Linux host, start by creating a file by running this command:
Paste the contents of 'fleet-install.sh' into nano editor:
Run the Fleet-install.sh with the command below:
sudo ./fleet-install.sh
Once the script completes, you'll see the agent in the Fleet screen as 'Active':
You can then confirm that data is flowing into the system (Go to 'Explore -> Logs & Insights):
Additional Links to helpful docs include:
The goal is to transport and process the collected data.
Key actions include:
Select or configure a data pipeline
Define data routing rules
Apply transformations, filtering, or enrichment if needed
Links to related docs include:
The goal is to enable insights by querying telemetry data.
Key actions include:
Understand the query language used
Create baseline queries for system health
Optimize queries for performance and cost
Validate query results
Links to related docs include:
The goal is to visualize system performance and behavior in real time.
Key actions include:
Use visual components
Organize dashboards by domain
Incorporate filters
Enable drill-down for troubleshooting.
Links to related docs include:
The goal is to detect anomalies and automate response actions.
Key actions include:
Define alerting rules
Set up alert destinations
Establish escalation policies and on-call schedules
Integrate with incident management workflows and postmortem tools
Links to related docs include:
Here are helpful links to other "Getting Started" technical guides:
