Getting Started with Venn

Where Venn lives in Apica Ascent, how to start a conversation, and what to ask first.

Venn is available on almost every page of Ascent. You never need to go looking for it.

Three ways to open Venn

• Floating bubble: click the bubble in the corner of any page (tooltip "Ask Venn"). It opens the Venn drawer.

• Drawer: a panel slides in from the right, titled Venn. You can pin it, widen it, start a New chat, or close it. The drawer stays with you as you navigate, and it is aware of the page you are on.

• Full page: choose Venn from the top navbar, or simply log in: the full-page chat at /venn is the default landing page. It shows "Ask Venn anything", starter prompts, and your conversation history.

The full-page Venn view: conversation history on the left, starter prompts, and the question box

The "Ask Venn" bubble

The Venn drawer's empty state

Type your question and press Enter to send (Shift+Enter for a new line).

Your first prompts

Good first questions to get a feel for Venn:

• "What namespaces am I ingesting data from?"

• "Show me errors from the last hour"

• "Which dataflows have the most errors in the last 24 hours?"

• "How do I set up a Kafka source?" (Venn answers how-to questions from the Apica documentation, inline in the chat)

• "Help me cut log volume from my noisiest app using telemetry pipelines"

Conversations

• Every chat is saved under Conversations on the full-page view, so you can return to and continue past conversations.

• Switching to another chat does not stop Venn: an in-flight answer keeps generating in the background, and results such as pipeline Review cards stay usable when you come back.

• After many answers Venn offers follow-up suggestions as clickable buttons. Clicking one sends it as your next message; you can always type your own instead.

First-time setup: connect an AI provider (admins)

Venn needs an AI provider before it can answer. An administrator sets this up once, in Settings > Admin Settings > Configuration, under the AI & Model section:

1. Pick the AI Provider: Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure, or LocalAI (a self-hosted OpenAI-compatible endpoint).

2. Enter the provider's API key and model (plus endpoint or base URL where applicable). Keys are stored as secrets and shown masked once saved.

3. Click Update Configuration. Changes apply immediately: the next message Venn handles uses the new provider. No restart is needed.

Settings > Admin Settings > Configuration: the AI & Model section

The same section also holds Venn's agent limits and switches (tool-call budgets, prompt caching, delete-tool enablement). See Administer Venn for the full reference.

What Venn will and will not do

Venn is an observability assistant, and it stays one:

• It answers questions about your logs, metrics, checks, dataflows, and about the Ascent product itself.

• It declines requests outside that scope (general knowledge, politics, unrelated coding tasks, legal or medical advice) and steers back to your data.

• It drafts things for you to review; it does not save or delete anything without your explicit approval. See Safety and control.