Onboarding services
A service is the unit Thalamus watches, and the unit you are billed for. Getting the definition right matters more than the mechanics.
What counts as a service
A production service you want the fleet to watch and act on — typically something with its own deployment, its own golden signals and its own on-call expectation.
Not every repository, and not every container. A monolith deployed as one unit is one service even if it contains forty modules. Three microservices with separate deployments and separate pagers are three.
Ask who gets paged when it breaks. If the answer is the same person for the same reason, it is probably one service.
The lifecycle
| Status | Meaning | Billed? |
|---|---|---|
draft | Created, not yet configured | No |
validated | Configuration checks pass, not yet watched | No |
live | The fleet is watching and acting | Yes |
Only live services count toward your tier. A service you started
configuring and abandoned does not appear on an invoice.
What to connect
- Monitoring — where the signals come from. Without it there is nothing to investigate.
- Repositories — so the fleet can correlate incidents with recent changes and propose fixes as pull requests.
- Ticketing — optional, but it is how resolution work leaves the system and reaches your process.
Credentials are encrypted at rest with a key held by your instance. See data and tenancy for what that means in practice.
Autonomy levels
Every service starts at observe and recommend, where the fleet changes nothing. You raise the level per service when you are ready, and you can lower it again at any time.
| Level | The fleet will |
|---|---|
| Observe | Investigate and report. No proposals. |
| Recommend | Propose fixes as pull requests for you to review. |
| Guarded | Act within limits you define, with an approval gate. |
| Autonomous | Act, and tell you what it did. |
Removing a service
Setting a service back from live stops the fleet watching it and stops it
counting toward your current usage. It does not retroactively reduce the peak
used at renewal — see billing for why.