# Observability

> Orbital automates API integration, and provides rich data discovery, so you can spend less time plumbing, and more time building.

Source: https://orbitalhq.com/docs/querying/observability

## Observing queries
As queries are executed by Orbital, full call histories are captured and persisted

This gives rich debugging tools to understand exactly how a query was executed,
which services were called and what they returned.

### Configuring what's captured
What Orbital records can be tuned - or turned off entirely - at three levels: server-wide defaults,
per workspace, and per query.

When fully enabled, the following detail is captured and written to a database:

 * Requests and Responses sent to services - such as APIs and Databases
 * Metadata - such as URLs, response times, payload sizes, response codes and headers
 * Message payloads for streaming event sources such as message brokers
 * Variations of the above data to build query plan charts visualised in the Orbital UI

Server defaults are set with the `orbital.history.*` settings (previously `vyne.analytics.*`).
Workspaces can override them from the **Workspace settings** page, and individual queries can carry a
`@QueryTelemetry` annotation. See [Query history settings](/docs/workspace/query-history-settings) for
the full list of settings and how the levels interact.

## Performance metrics - Prometheus
Orbital publishes metrics available for prometheus to collect.

If Orbital is connected to a Prometheus endpoint, performance data is made available in the Endpoints UI.

_Image: Performance metrics_

### Streaming queries
The following metrics are published for persistent queries (both streaming and request / response queries)

 * Count of requests processed 
 * Processing duration
 * Error Counts

Prometheus can then provide this data in histogram, providing min / max and averages

### Configuring Prometheus
An example prometheus configuration is shown below

```yaml
   - job_name: 'Orbital Metrics'
     metrics_path: '/api/actuator/prometheus'
     scrape_interval: 3s
     static_configs:
        #        172.17.0.1 is the ip address of localhost
        #        from within docker
        - targets: ['172.17.0.1:9022']
          labels:
             application: 'Orbital'
```