> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.prequel.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Logs & observability for self-hosted

> Configuring logs and observability for your self-hosted deployment

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Std-out logs" icon="rectangle-terminal" href="#std-out-logs">
    Structured logs that every Prequel service writes to std-out.
  </Card>

  <Card title="OTEL" icon="chart-line" href="#observability">
    Export OpenTelemetry traces and metrics to your observability stack.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Logging" icon="list-tree" href="/export/monitoring/monitoring">
    The platform events Prequel records, reviewable through the logs API.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Webhooks" icon="webhook" href="/export/monitoring/webhooks">
    Subscribe to event types and push them to your systems as they happen.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## Std-out logs

By default, all Prequel services surface structured logs to std-out. The structure of these logs should be somewhat intuitive, but please get in touch with the Prequel team if you have questions about the specific structure of certain logs. To facilitate debugging, we recommend ingesting these logs into AWS CloudWatch, GCP Logs Explorer, or your preferred logging solution.

<Warning>
  **Unsafe traces**

  On occasion, an external dependency not controlled by Prequel (such as a database driver) will produce a trace that might have the potential to contain transfer data. These traces are tagged with the `unsafe_trace` key in any Prequel structured log.

  To ensure compliance with your own user-data retention policies, we suggest either not ingesting those keys to logs, or ensuring that your logs are in line with any retention policies you may be bound to. See the relevant [GCP documentation](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/exclude-logs#add-filter) and [AWS documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch-Agent-Configuration-File-Details.html) on how to avoid ingesting those logs.
</Warning>

## Observability

Prequel code is instrumented with the Open Telemetry (OTEL) standard. Self-hosted deployments give the ability to export those telemetry events to the observability solution of your choice. We offer native support for solutions including Datadog, Elastic, Honeycomb, and more. Please get in touch with the team for information on how to set these up.