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Synadia Insights

Quick Start

There are two ways to get started with Insights: against the built-in simulator (no license, no external NATS required), or against a real NATS system you already operate.

  • Simulator. Explore the web UI, search language, and audit checks with synthetic data. No license needed.
  • Real NATS system. Point Insights at a running NATS deployment with system account credentials. Configure a license before running the commands in the second half of this page.

Run Against the Simulator

./insights --simulator.enabled

This runs everything in a single process:

  • A simulated NATS deployment with multiple clusters, servers, accounts, streams, consumers, and connections.
  • The scraper, pulling data from the simulated servers every minute.
  • The indexer, storing time-series snapshots into an in-memory DuckDB database.
  • The web UI, serving the dashboard on port 8080.

All data is ephemeral by default. Open http://127.0.0.1:8080 in your browser.

To pick a larger or different topology:

# A medium-sized super cluster
./insights --simulator.enabled --simulator.profile super-medium

# A large core NATS deployment (no JetStream)
./insights --simulator.enabled --simulator.profile core-large

# A leaf node topology
./insights --simulator.enabled --simulator.profile leaf-small

Available profile families: core-{small,medium,large}, js-{small,medium,large}, super-{small,medium,large}, leaf-{small,medium,large}, super-leaf-{small,medium,large}.

To persist simulator data across restarts:

./insights --simulator.enabled --data-dir ./insights-data

Run Against a Real NATS System

Insights connects to a target NATS system using the system account and collects data from the $SYS monitoring endpoints. This is read-only. Insights does not modify the target system.

Prerequisites

  • A valid license. See Installation › Configure a License.
  • Credentials for the system account ($SYS), typically as a .creds file or a pre-configured NATS context.
  • Network reachability from the Insights process to the target NATS servers.

Connect with credentials

./insights \
  --license.file /etc/insights/license.jwt \
  --sys.server nats://your-nats:4222 \
  --sys.creds /path/to/sys.creds

Connect with a NATS context

If you already manage credentials with the NATS CLI, reuse an existing context:

./insights \
  --license.file /etc/insights/license.jwt \
  --sys.context my-system

Authentication options

--sys.* supports the same authentication mechanisms as any NATS client:

MethodFlags
Credentials file--sys.creds /path/to/sys.creds
NATS context--sys.context my-context
Basic auth--sys.user USER --sys.password PASS
NKey--sys.nkey SEED
JWT--sys.jwt TOKEN

TLS options (--sys.tls-cert, --sys.tls-key, --sys.tlsca, --sys.tls-first) and SOCKS proxying (--sys.socks-proxy) are also available.

Persist data

Add --data-dir to keep the DuckDB database and JetStream state across process restarts:

./insights \
  --license.file /etc/insights/license.jwt \
  --sys.server nats://your-nats:4222 \
  --sys.creds /path/to/sys.creds \
  --data-dir /var/lib/insights

See the Deployment Guide for topology choices, external sink configuration, headless mode, and production settings.

Open the Web UI

With either mode running, open http://127.0.0.1:8080. Use --web.hostname 0.0.0.0 to expose it on all interfaces.

The overview page shows system-wide cluster status, server and connection counts, JetStream usage, and active audit check findings. The sidebar navigates to per-entity views (clusters, servers, accounts, streams, consumers, connections, KV and object stores). The time control bar lets you switch between live mode and a pinned point in time.

As data accumulates, audit check findings appear on entity detail pages and on the overview, tagged by severity and grouped into six categories.

Next Steps

Next
Concepts