Voyager Get Started Guide
Getting Started with Scoutflo
Welcome to Voyager, your AI-powered DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) platform. This document will guide you step-by-step to unlock the platform’s full potential in troubleshooting, monitoring, cloud infrastructure provisioning, and automation.
Platform Setup Overview
When you log into Voyager for the first time, the Platform Setup Progress dashboard welcomes you with two primary modes of operation:
Troubleshoot: focused on setting up alerting, monitoring, and incident response workflows.
Provision: focused on infrastructure provisioning through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform.
Your goal is to complete the configurations in both modes to fully leverage Voyager’s capabilities. Progress bars indicate how much of each mode you have completed.
Mode 1: Troubleshoot: Building Your Monitoring and Incident Management System
This mode helps you establish an end-to-end incident visibility and troubleshooting system that spans application errors, container health, and cloud resource issues enabling your team to proactively detect and respond to problems.
Step 1: Configure Notifications and Monitoring Tools
Why This Step Matters
Capturing incidents and performance degradation as they happen and notifying the right teams immediately are keys to reducing downtime and maintaining system reliability.
Notifications Setup
Connect Slack for Real-Time Alerts Slack is a popular communication channel where your team collaborates daily. By integrating Slack with Voyager, you ensure that critical issues and alerts are pushed instantly into the conversation channels your team actively monitors. This timely visibility reduces mean time to detection (MTTD) and helps initiate quicker incident response.
Monitoring Tools Setup
Set Up Sentry for Application Error Monitoring Sentry captures detailed error reports directly from your applications, including stack traces, error frequency, and affected users. This integration pipelines error data into Voyager’s troubleshooting dashboard, enabling you to identify faulty code quickly and understand the impact of bugs in production or staging environments.
Action: Initiate Sentry setup by linking your Sentry account or creating a new project connected to your app.
Set Up Datadog for Infrastructure Monitoring (Coming Soon) Datadog provides cloud infrastructure monitoring by tracking server metrics such as CPU usage, memory, disk I/O, and network traffic. This visibility allows you to detect infrastructure bottlenecks or unusual resource consumption patterns that affect application performance.
Set Up Prometheus for Metrics Collection (Coming Soon) Prometheus collects and stores numeric time-series data from services and Kubernetes clusters. It is a powerful tool for tracking resource consumption, request latencies, and custom business metrics.
Set Up Grafana for Metrics Visualization (Coming Soon) Grafana allows you to build dashboards visualizing your Prometheus and other metric data streams. These dashboards facilitate pattern recognition, anomaly detection, and capacity planning conversations.
Step 1 Outcomes
By completing this foundational step, you will have achieved the following:
Alerting Channels: Set up essential alerting channels (pending Slack integration) to ensure instant notification and actionable incident alerts to your team.
Error Tracking: Integrated Sentry for application error tracking, providing engineers with detailed context for swift debugging.
Monitoring Foundation: Prepared the basis for enhanced infrastructure and container monitoring using Datadog, Prometheus, and Grafana (available in future updates).
This initial observability layer empowers your team to promptly detect incidents and begin effective troubleshooting.
Step 2: Connect Your Infrastructure Resources
Why This Step Is Essential
Troubleshooting across isolated systems is inefficient. By connecting your code repositories, cloud accounts, and Kubernetes clusters, you create cross-layer visibility that empowers your team to rapidly locate incident causes at any layer whether a code bug, container failure, or cloud resource outage.
GitHub Repository Connection
Integrate GitHub to Link Errors to Code By connecting your GitHub repositories, Voyager links runtime errors and incidents back to specific commits and pull requests. This code-aware troubleshooting dramatically accelerates identifying tasks for developers and reduces the context-switching typically required to diagnose failures.
Action: Authenticate with GitHub and select repositories relevant to your applications.
Cloud Provider Connection
Connect AWS, Azure, or GCP Accounts Linking cloud accounts enables Voyager to discover and monitor your cloud resources such as virtual machines, storage, load balancers, and managed services.
Visibility into cloud infrastructure is crucial because many production issues stem from cloud resource constraints, misconfigurations, or failures.
Action: Use the Cloud Connection screens to add your cloud credentials securely. Follow prompts to deploy CloudFormation templates or equivalent for role-based access with least privilege.
Kubernetes Cluster Connection
Add Kubernetes for Container-Level Observability Containers and their orchestrators are increasingly central to application deployments. Integrating your Kubernetes clusters provides real-time data on pod lifecycle events, resource usage, logs, and health status.
With this data, your troubleshooting workflows gain the context of which services or containers are impacted and the resource behaviors at fault or risk.
Action: Use the “Set up your Kubernetes Cluster” option to connect your cluster via kubeconfig or API credentials, following guided steps.
Outcomes After Step 2
After successfully connecting your infrastructure resources, you unlock:
Full-stack monitoring: code, container, and cloud infrastructure data converged for end-to-end visibility.
Ability to correlate incidents automatically across layers (e.g., an AWS EC2 instance issue impacting Kubernetes pod availability causing application errors).
Enriched alerts containing actionable context showing affected services, recent changes, logs, and infrastructure metrics.
Comprehensive real-time dashboards to monitor system health and track incident resolution progress.
Optional Advanced Setup for Automated Remediation
Enable AWS IAM 'Write' Access Grant Voyager permissions to automatically restart failed cloud instances, scale resources, or remediate common infrastructure errors without your manual intervention.
Enable Kubernetes Write Access Allow Voyager to perform automated actions such as pod restarts, deployment scaling, or configuration adjustments for swift container ecosystem remediation.
These optional setups save operational time by closing the automation loop on common incident recoveries.
Mode 2: Provision: Automating Infrastructure Deployment via Terraform
This mode focuses on enabling a robust, version-controlled infrastructure-as-code workflow. It empowers your team to define, generate, review, and deploy cloud infrastructure in a repeatable, auditable manner.
Step 1: Terraform Code Generation Setup
Required Actions
Link GitHub for Terraform Code Storage Connect your GitHub repository where generated Terraform configurations will be stored. This integration facilitates collaboration, auditing, and rollback, just as with application code.
Connect Your Cloud Provider with Read Access Voyager needs read-only access to your existing cloud environment to generate Terraform code that accurately reflects and extends your infrastructure.
What You Get After Step 1
Automatic generation of Terraform configurations that follow industry best practices.
A fully version-controlled infrastructure code base stored directly alongside your application code.
Ability to review Terraform plans showing exactly which cloud resources will be added, modified, or destroyed prior to deployment.
Step 2: Cloud Infrastructure Creation and Deployment (Optional)
This final step enables turnkey infrastructure provisioning and management with increased automation.
Advanced Configuration Options
Enable AWS IAM 'Write' Access Grant Voyager permissions to apply Terraform configurations by creating, updating, or destroying AWS resources according to your defined infrastructure.
Enable Kubernetes Cluster Write Access Allow Voyager to deploy applications and Kubernetes resource manifests directly within your clusters.
Setup Service Deployment Settings
Container Registry Integration: Connect to Docker Hub, AWS ECR, or other container repositories for seamless container image storage and retrieval.
Secret Manager Integration: Securely manage environment variables, API keys, and other secrets required for your deployable services.
Domain and SSL Certificate Setup: Manage DNS and automate SSL certificates for public-facing applications, ensuring secure and branded URLs.
Outcomes After Completing Step 2
You will gain:
An end-to-end automated infrastructure deployment pipeline.
Continuous deployment of cloud resources defined via Terraform in a safe, version-controlled manner.
Automated container application deployment workflows including scaling, health checks, and rolling updates.
Integrated management of secrets and certificates ensuring security throughout your delivery process.
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