Skip to content

User Manual

This section is for people using Tracedown: setting up checks, reading what came back, and getting told when something breaks. If you are the one running the installation, start with Installation instead.

The short version

You organise work into workspaces and projects, and the thing that actually gets monitored is a service: one probe script, one schedule, and a policy for which agents run it. The script is written in Lace, and it decides both what to check and what is worth alerting on.

That last point surprises people, so it is worth saying up front: there is no alert-rule builder. Alerting is expressed inside the probe script, next to the assertion it relates to. See Notifications for why.

Read in this order

  • Concepts


    The hierarchy, what a probe run actually is, and the vocabulary the rest of these pages assume.

  • Workspaces & Projects


    Where things live and why the nesting exists.

  • Services


    Creating a check: schedule, agents, queue policy, run-now.

  • Writing Probes


    Lace in the editor: assertions, chaining, and emitting alerts.

Then, as you need them

Page Read it when
Variables You need credentials or a base URL in a script, or a value carried between runs.
Reading Results A probe failed and you want to know why, or you want the numbers in Grafana.
Notifications You want alerts to reach a person or a webhook.
Silences & Quiet Hours The alerts are reaching you too often, or at 3am.
Maintenance Windows You have planned downtime and don't want it recorded as an outage.
Users & Permissions Someone else needs in, or needs to stop getting paged.
Your Account Two-factor, sessions, password, personal settings.