Overview

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Observer Web is an easy-to-use tool that integrates into your application, providing enhanced observability. Leveraging OTP distribution, it offers tracing and profiling through the Erlang debugger, along with detailed insights into process/port statuses and Beam VM statistics.

Powered by Phoenix LiveView, it is distributed, lightweight, fully real-time and safe to use in production. This library is part of the DeployEx project.

Features

  • 🐦‍🔥 Embedded LiveView - Mount the dashboard directly in your application without any external dependencies.

Liveview

  • 🔍 Real Time Tracing - Trace any function within your application, capturing parameters passed and also function callers, as many other possibilities.

Observer Tracing Dashboard

  • 🔥 Function Profiling - Aggregate traced calls into a report instead of a live stream: call counts, durations (sum, average, min, max or a distribution histogram), per-process call sequence trees and flame graphs, all with the same production-safe limits as tracing.

Observer Profiling Dashboard

  • 📋 Process Top - The busiest processes on any node, etop style: ranked by reductions per interval, memory or message queue length, with a drill-down into each process's status, stacktrace, links and more.

Observer Processes Dashboard

  • 🧮 System Snapshot - Runtime information, resource usage against the VM limits (processes, ports, atoms, ETS tables) and memory allocator carrier utilization, plus an opt-in scheduler utilization time series in the Metrics dashboard.

Observer System Dashboard

  • 🗄️ ETS & Mnesia Browser - Every ETS or Mnesia table on any node with owner, protection/storage, type and memory footprint, searchable and sortable - plus opt-in, read-only, bounded content previews.

Observer ETS Dashboard

  • 🌐 Network - The busiest inet ports on any node ranked by bytes received/sent per interval, with local/remote endpoints, owning process, full statistics and socket options - plus the NIF-based socket module sockets that port listings miss.

Observer Network Dashboard

  • 💥 Crash Dump Browser - Upload an erl_crash.dump from your machine, or open one from an allowlisted directory on the host, then read the crash slogan, the VM's state at crash time and every dumped process - stacks and message queues included - parsed with OTP's own crashdump_viewer. Requires the :observer application in your release.

Observer Crashdump Dashboard

  • 🔬 Process/Port Inspection - View processes and ports details as well as their status and connectivity (and much more), with a per-application summary table: process/port counts, version and on-demand memory/reductions totals.

Observer Application Dashboard

  • 📊 Realtime VM Metrics - Powered by ets table and OTP distribution, vm memory statistics are stored and easily filtered.

Observer Metrics Dashboard

  • 🖼️ Embedded Mode - Observer Web can be run using iframes, seamlessly integrating the observability experience within your application.

Installation

See the installation guide for details on installing and configuring Observer Web for your application.