Part 8: Environments #

Kosli environments allow you to record the artifacts running in your runtime environments and how they change. Every time an environment change (or a set of changes) is reported, Kosli creates a new environment snapshot containing the status of the environment at a given point in time.

Create an environment #

You can create Kosli environments in the app, via CLI or via the API. When you create an environment, you give it a name, a description and select its type.

Make sure that type of Kosli environment matches the type of the environment you'll be reporting from.

Via CLI #

To create an environment via CLI, you would run a command like this:

$ kosli create environment quickstart \
    --environment-type docker \
    --description "quickstart environment for tutorial"

See kosli create environment for CLI usage details and examples.

Via UI #

You can also create an environment directly from app.kosli.com.

Make sure you've selected the organization you want to use from the orgs dropdown in the top left corner.
Click on Environments in the left navigation menu.
Click the Add new environment button
Fill in the environment name and description and select a type, then click Save Environment.

After the new environment is created you'll be redirected to its page - with "No events have been found for [...]" message. Once you start reporting your actual runtime environment to Kosli you'll see all the events (such as which artifacts started or stopped running) listed on that page.

Snapshoting an environment #

To record the current status of your environment you need to make Kosli CLI scrape the running artifacts in it and report it to Kosli. When Kosli receives an environment report, if the received list of running artifacts is different than what is in the latest environment snapshot, a new environment snapshot is created. Snapshots are immutable and can't be tampered with.

Currently, the following environment types are supported:

Kubernetes
Docker
Paths on a server
AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)
AWS Lambda
AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

While you can report environment snapshots manually using the kosli snapshot [...] commands for testing, for production use, you would configure the reporting to happen automatically on regular intervals, e.g. via a cron job or scheduled CI job, or on certain events.

You can follow one of the tutorials below to setup automatic snapshot reporting for your environment: