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Quick Start

Get started with Cleric

Cleric investigates production issues through Slack or the web interface. This guide walks through connecting Cleric to your environment and running your first investigation.

Connect Cleric to Your Environment

The integrations you configure determine what Cleric can investigate and the context it draws on. Connect them in this order:

1. Slack

Invite Cleric to your alerting and incident channels in Slack. Cleric analyzes the channel history to identify common problems and their resolutions. It also replays past alerts to identify patterns and access limitations, so that it's ready to investigate when an alert comes in live.

Cleric only learns from channels where it is a member, so add it to every channel where you want it active.

2. Where Your Workloads Run

Connect the platform that runs your services, e.g. Elastic Kubernetes Service, Elastic Container Service, or your own Kubernetes control plane. Cleric uses this to discover your service catalog (which workloads exist, how they relate) and to query the live state of your workloads and infrastructure events during investigations.

3. Observability

Connect your logging, metrics, and tracing systems. Cleric queries them during investigations, mapping services to their identifiers and learning each system's query conventions (filter syntax, tag schemes, metric naming). See supported integrations for the full list.

Cleric begins calibrating to your environment as soon as you connect your first integration. See How Cleric Learns for more.

Your First Investigation

Start an Investigation

You can start investigations from Slack or the web interface.

From Slack:

In any channel where Cleric is present, mention @Cleric with your question:

From the Web:

  1. Go to <your-company>.app.cleric.ai

  2. Click "New issue"

  3. Describe the issue

  4. Cleric begins analysis immediately

Complete Investigation Example

Here's what a full investigation looks like from start to finish:

Your question:

Cleric's investigation:

Your follow-up:

Cleric's response:

Cleric maintains context throughout the thread, so you can continue asking follow-up questions without repeating information.

What Else Can You Do?

For more investigation examples, see Common Use Cases, which includes 40+ example prompts for:

  • Incident investigation and debugging

  • Service health checks

  • Log and metric analysis

  • Proactive scans

  • Incident retrospectives

  • Knowledge retrieval

Tips for Better Investigations

Be Specific

Include details to help Cleric scope the investigation:

❌ Too vague:

✅ Better:

Include Time Windows

Specify when the issue started or what time range to examine:

Request Evidence

Ask for links to dashboards, logs, and metrics:

Specify Data Sources

Guide Cleric to specific integrations when needed:

Automatic Alert Investigation

Instead of manually starting investigations, you can configure Cleric to automatically investigate alerts posted to Slack channels.

See Configuring Automations to set up automatic investigations based on keywords.

Next Steps

Now that you've run your first investigation:

  1. Teach Cleric about your environment

  2. Automate investigations

  3. Explore advanced use cases

    • See Common Use Cases for investigation patterns

    • Learn how to use Cleric for retrospectives, proactive scans, and more

  4. Add more integrations

Getting Help

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