Skip to content
Contrail logoContrail

Quick start

From zero to a service’s live logs. You need Contrail and at least one SSO profile in your AWS config. The AWS CLI v2 is optional: Contrail logs in itself when it isn’t installed.

Install

Section titled “Install”

Download Contrail

Open the .dmg (Apple silicon or Intel) and drag Contrail into Applications. The app isn’t signed by Apple yet: the first time, right-click it and choose Open.

Your first logs

Section titled “Your first logs”

  1. Pick a profile. Contrail lists the profiles from ~/.aws/config (or AWS_CONFIG_FILE) with their SSO session state. Switch with Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P; search by name, account ID or region.

  2. Log in. If the session has expired, Log in runs aws sso login --profile <name> for you and the browser opens. Without the CLI, Contrail opens the login page itself and shows the code to confirm there. The AWS SDK handles the credentials.

  3. Open a service. Expand a cluster in the sidebar and click a service, or press Cmd/Ctrl+K and type part of its name. Star it to pin it to the sidebar.

  4. Read the logs. The Logs tab loads the last minutes of all its tasks and then follows them live. Click a line to see its fields, the raw JSON and the stack trace.

  5. Search. Type in the search box: level>=WARN timeout, trace.id:abc123, -healthcheck. See the search syntax for everything it understands.

Not allowed to read something?

Section titled “Not allowed to read something?”

Contrail only reads from AWS (unless you allow changes in the settings). If your role misses a permission, Contrail tells you instead of failing silently; the AWS permissions page has the policy to give to whoever manages your SSO roles.

Try it without AWS

Section titled “Try it without AWS”

Demo mode starts Contrail with invented profiles, clusters and logs, and never talks to AWS:

Terminal window
CONTRAIL_DEMO=1 /Applications/Contrail.app/Contents/MacOS/contrail   # macOS

On Windows and Linux, start Contrail with --demo.