Orbtrace
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UI tour

Every layout element of the Orbtrace UI explained — top bar, sidebar, time picker, command palette, theme, footer. Read once before the per-screen guides.

Every screen in Orbtrace shares the same four-piece chrome. Learn it once, then every per-screen guide will assume you know where the controls are.

The four parts of the chrome

On screen
  • ① Top barAcross the entire window, always visible. Holds the logo, breadcrumb, time picker, search palette trigger, and your account menu.
  • ② Left sidebarPermanent on desktop, hidden behind a hamburger on mobile. Top-level navigation to every section: Home, Services, Service map, Explore, Dashboards, Alerts, Incidents, Replay, Admin.
  • ③ Main contentThe middle column. Whatever you clicked in the sidebar renders here.
  • ④ Right drawerSlides in from the right when you click an item that has a detail view (a trace, a log, a service, an incident). Closes with Esc or by clicking outside.

Top bar, left to right

On screen
  • LogoClicking it always returns you to the Home dashboard.
  • BreadcrumbShows where you are. Each crumb is clickable.
  • Time pickerThe single most important control. Every chart and every query on the current page respects this range. See the next section.
  • Search palette (⌘K)Opens a global "type to find anything" palette. Jump to any service, any saved query, any alert, any incident, any admin page in two keystrokes.
  • Refresh / live toggleForces a re-fetch, or pins the page to auto-refresh every N seconds.
  • Account menuYour name, role, theme toggle (dark/light), language toggle (EN/TR), sign-out.

The time picker — read this carefully

The time picker controls every time-bound chart and query on the page. Misunderstanding it causes more confused screenshots than any other control.

Three modes:

  • Quick range — pick a preset: Last 5 m, Last 15 m, Last 1 h, Last 6 h, Last 24 h, Last 7 d, Last 30 d. Quick ranges are relative and roll forward in real time when auto-refresh is on.
  • Absolute — pick exact from and to timestamps. The page is "frozen" — auto-refresh does nothing.
  • Around an event — when you arrive at a screen via a deep link (e.g. clicking "see in logs" from an incident), the time picker is set to a window centered on that event. The pill turns blue to signal "anchored to event".

Tips:

  • The picker honours your local timezone, but every timestamp in the UI also includes the IANA name (e.g. Europe/Istanbul) so screenshots are unambiguous.
  • The picker's "live" pulse dot is green when auto-refresh is on, grey when off.

The left sidebar — every section

On screen
  • HomeOverview screen — the dashboard you land on after sign-in. Tells you "is the system OK right now?".
  • ServicesList of every service that has sent data in the last 24 h, with a health summary per service.
  • Service mapA live graph of who calls whom, with edge thickness proportional to traffic.
  • Explore → Live tailStreaming log lines, like tail -f but for your whole fleet.
  • Explore → LogsSearch and filter logs, with the histogram on top.
  • Explore → TracesSearch and filter traces.
  • Explore → MetricsMetric explorer — pick a metric, slice by attributes, plot.
  • DashboardsCurated dashboards. Drag-and-drop your own panels here.
  • AlertsRules, channels, routing, escalations, schedules, silences — the full alerting console.
  • IncidentsRCA results — one entry per anomaly the system detected (or one a human opened manually).
  • ReplayTime-Travel Replay — the counterfactual engine.
  • OperationsPer-service operation drill-down — the inverse of the Services list, viewed by endpoint.
  • AdminAI provider, SLOs, sampling, users, integrations, license, anomaly settings, health. Visible only to administrators (the ADMIN role).

The command palette (⌘K / Ctrl+K)

Press ⌘K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Linux/Windows) anywhere in the app. A search box appears. Start typing — Orbtrace fuzzy-matches across:

  • All your services.
  • All your saved searches.
  • All admin pages.
  • All alerts and incidents from the current time range.

Arrows move, Enter opens, Esc closes. If you find yourself clicking the sidebar more than twice, you're losing time to UI overhead — use ⌘K instead.

Keyboard shortcuts

On screen
  • ⌘K / Ctrl+KOpen the command palette.
  • /Focus the inline search input on Logs/Traces screens.
  • g hGo to Home.
  • g sGo to Services.
  • g tGo to Traces.
  • g lGo to Logs.
  • g aGo to Alerts.
  • g iGo to Incidents.
  • ?Show the full keyboard cheat sheet.
  • EscClose drawer, close dialog, blur input.

Dark / light theme

The default theme is dark — chosen because dashboards are watched for hours and a dark surface causes less eye fatigue under fluorescent on-call lighting. Light theme exists for daylight ops and is one toggle away in the account menu.

Language

Orbtrace UI ships in English and Turkish. Switch in the account menu. The change is instant; URLs do not need a prefix.

The footer (every page)

A single thin line at the bottom: build commit hash, server-side git branch, server timezone, and an "All systems normal" pill that turns red when the backend can't reach Doris or Postgres. If that pill is red, stop what you're doing and read Troubleshooting.

Next: Home dashboard — your landing page after sign-in.

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