GraphOS Observability Overview
Capture and export signals about supergraph health with GraphOS and router telemetry
Apollo GraphOS provides the observability signals and tools your team needs to monitor the health and performance of your deployed supergraph. It collects operation metrics from across your supergraph and presents them in its Studio Insights suite to help you visualize and analyze the state of your supergraph.
How observability in GraphOS works
GraphOS collects its metrics from clients, routers, and subgraphs. By default, GraphOS Router automatically reports operation and field usage metrics to GraphOS Studio.
To gain deeper insights into the health of your supergraph, you can configure your GraphOS Router to collect telemetry about requests as they're processed through the pipeline of the router request lifecycle. The router provides both standard and customizable signals.
GraphOS supports exporting its collected metrics to various observability tools. GraphOS Studio offers a Datadog integration, and GraphOS Router provides exporters for several observability tools and APMs.
Analyzing metrics and gathering insights with GraphOS
Everything connected to GraphOS—including clients, routers, and subgraphs—can report metrics about GraphQL operations they send and service. GraphOS thus is the hub for collecting operation metrics.
Once operation and field usage metrics are collected by GraphOS, you can use the GraphOS Studio Insights suite to visualize and analyze them to understand your supergraph's usage and performance.
Additionally, you can forward the metrics that GraphOS collects to your APM solution. Apollo offers a Datadog integration to forward your graph's performance metrics to your Datadog account.
Enabling additional runtime telemetry
Both the GraphOS Router and Apollo Router Core run a request-handling pipeline with multiple stages that starts with receiving requests and ends with sending back responses. The continuous operation and throughput of this request pipeline, or request lifecycle, reflects the health of a running supergraph. Observability of the router request lifecycle is therefore key to understanding the health of a supergraph.
To enable observability, the router supports telemetry that can be added and customized in different stages of the router request lifecycle. You can add logs, metrics, and traces and export them to your application performance monitoring (APM) solution.
To learn more, go to Router Telemetry, then browse the pages in Router Telemetry reference docs.
Next steps
Learn how to use GraphOS Insights to monitor and improve your graph's performance.
Learn how to configure router telemetry
Learn about subgraph observability.
Learn about client observability.
Learn how to enable GraphOS notifications.