Glean Observability

Overview

Glean aggregates enterprise knowledge across dozens of connectors, making indexing health and search quality the two pillars of observability. Monitor connector sync status to catch stale content before users notice, track search latency to maintain sub-second responses, and measure zero-result rates to identify coverage gaps. Degraded indexing silently erodes search relevance, so proactive alerting is essential.

Key Metrics

Instrumentation

async function trackGleanSearch(query: string, client: GleanClient) {
  const start = Date.now();
  try {
    const results = await client.search({ query });
    const latency = Date.now() - start;
    metrics.histogram('glean.search.latency', latency);
    metrics.increment('glean.search.total');
    if (results.totalCount === 0) metrics.increment('glean.search.zero_results');
    return results;
  } catch (err) {
    metrics.increment('glean.search.errors', { error: err.code });
    throw err;
  }
}

Health Check Dashboard

async function gleanHealth(): Promise<Record<string, string>> {
  const connectors = await gleanAdmin.getConnectorStatus();
  const staleRatio = await gleanAdmin.getStaleContentRatio(30);
  const searchP95 = await metrics.query('glean.search.latency', 'p95', '5m');
  return {
    connectors: connectors.every(c => c.status === 'ok') ? 'healthy' : 'degraded',
    content_freshness: staleRatio < 0.1 ? 'healthy' : 'stale',
    search_latency: searchP95 < 400 ? 'healthy' : 'slow',
  };
}

Alerting Rules

const alerts = [
  { metric: 'glean.search.latency_p95', condition: '> 1000ms', window: '10m', severity: 'warning' },
  { metric: 'glean.search.zero_result_rate', condition: '> 0.10', window: '1h', severity: 'warning' },
  { metric: 'glean.indexing.sync_errors', condition: '> 3', window: '1h', severity: 'critical' },
  { metric: 'glean.indexing.doc_count_delta', condition: 'drop > 20%', window: '1d', severity: 'critical' },
];

Structured Logging

function logGleanEvent(event: string, data: Record<string, any>) {
  console.log(JSON.stringify({
    service: 'glean', event,
    connector: data.connector, doc_count: data.docCount,
    query: data.query ? data.query.substring(0, 100) : undefined,
    latency_ms: data.latency, result_count: data.resultCount,
    timestamp: new Date().toISOString(),
  }));
}

Error Handling

Resources

• Glean Developer Portal
• Indexing API
• Search API

Next Steps

See glean-incident-runbook.