Operations and observability
Once your game is running on Heroic Cloud, you need visibility into how it’s performing and tools to act on what you see. Heroic Cloud provides built-in monitoring, logging, and data export for every Nakama deployment. For studios that need deeper integration with their own observability stack, the add-ons extend these capabilities with continuous log shipping, Prometheus-compatible metric endpoints, read-only database replicas, and application profiling.
What’s included with every deployment #
Every Nakama deployment comes with the following at no additional cost:
- Graphs showing time-series performance data: load balancer request counts, CPU and memory utilization per node, database CPU, and database query load. See Dashboard metrics and logs.
- Logs with full-text search, severity filtering, date range selection, and one-time export. All logs are in UTC. See Dashboard metrics and logs.
- Top database queries surfacing the most expensive SQL queries with an impact indicator to identify optimization targets.
- Audit trail tracking every user action on the deployment: who deployed, who scaled, who changed configuration. See Audit log.
- Data export for downloading a complete PostgreSQL snapshot of your deployment’s database at any time. See Data exporting.
Additional add-ons #
For studios that run their own observability platforms or need capabilities beyond the built-in tools:
- Log exporting ships logs to an S3 bucket in near real-time (20-30 second delay) as JSON. Ingest into Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog, Grafana Loki, or any platform that reads from S3. See Log exporting.
- Metric exporting provides a Prometheus-conforming endpoint you scrape every minute. Includes Nakama application metrics and any custom metrics you emit from your game module. Plot in Grafana or any compatible tool. See Metric exporting.
- Database replica gives you a read-only database accessible over the internet for querying production data without impacting performance. See Additional add-ons.
- Profiling provides application-level profiling for your Nakama instances. See Additional add-ons.
To enable any add-on, contact Heroic Labs (support@heroiclabs.com). See Billing for how add-on charges work.
When to use what #
| Need | Tool | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Quick health check or debugging | Built-in graphs and logs | Included |
| Identify slow queries | Top database queries | Included |
| Track who changed what | Audit log | Included |
| Export your data as a one-off in SQL format. This is not for backing up or migration. | Data export | Included |
| Export Nakama logs in near real-time to an S3 bucket, per deployment | Log exporting add-on | Optionally enabled |
| Scrape Heroic Cloud metrics in Prometheus format | Metric exporting add-on | Optionally enabled |
| Read-only database access on a real-time replicated database | Database replica add-on | Optionally enabled |
| CPU, Memory, and Mutex Contention continuous profiling | Profiling add-on | Optionally enabled |
Disaster recovery #
Heroic Cloud automatically backs up your database daily and replicates data across availability zones for high availability deployments. See Disaster recovery and backups.
Load testing #
Before going live, validate your deployment’s performance under realistic load. Development instances can’t be used for load testing. See Load test your Nakama deployment.
See also #
- Scaling for resource tiers and when to scale.
- Nakama deployments for the Graphs, Logs, and Data Export tabs.
