# Quick Start

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](/integrations/supported-integrations.md#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](/integrations/supported-integrations.md#elastic-kubernetes-service), [Elastic Container Service](/integrations/supported-integrations.md#amazon-web-services), or your own [Kubernetes](/integrations/supported-integrations.md#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](/integrations/supported-integrations.md) for the full list.

{% hint style="info" %}
Cleric begins calibrating to your environment as soon as you connect your first integration. See [How Cleric Learns](/learning/how-cleric-learns.md#calibration) for more.
{% endhint %}

## 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:

{% code overflow="wrap" %}

```
@Cleric Investigate why the payment API response times are higher than usual.
```

{% endcode %}

**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:**

{% code overflow="wrap" %}

```
@Cleric Investigate why the payment API response times are higher than usual.
```

{% endcode %}

**Cleric's investigation:**

{% code overflow="wrap" %}

```
**Root Cause:** Database query performance degradation on pricing-api

**Timeline:**
• 2:15 PM: Query latency started increasing
• 2:20 PM: P95 API latency exceeded 500ms threshold
• Current: P95 latency at 850ms (baseline: 250-300ms)

**Evidence:**
• Database query time increased from 50ms to 600ms average
• Slow query: SELECT * FROM prices WHERE product_id IN (...) loading 500+ products
• No recent deployments (last deploy: yesterday 3pm)
```

{% endcode %}

**Your follow-up:**

{% code overflow="wrap" %}

```
What's the typical query performance for pricing-api?
```

{% endcode %}

**Cleric's response:**

{% code overflow="wrap" %}

```
Baseline (last 7 days): 40-60ms P95
Current: 600ms+ P95 (10x degradation)

Started after 2x traffic increase this morning.
```

{% endcode %}

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](/investigation/common-use-cases.md), 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:**

```
@Cleric Something is wrong
```

✅ **Better:**

```
@Cleric Users are reporting 503 errors on the checkout page since 2pm EST. Check GCP logs and recent deployments.
```

### Include Time Windows

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

{% code overflow="wrap" %}

```
@Cleric Check error logs for the last 4 hours

@Cleric What happened to the payments service between 2pm and 3pm PST?

@Cleric Compare current memory usage to baseline from last week
```

{% endcode %}

### Request Evidence

Ask for links to dashboards, logs, and metrics:

{% code overflow="wrap" %}

```
@Cleric Check payments health and include evidence links

@Cleric Show me which pods are using the most memory, with links to metrics
```

{% endcode %}

### Specify Data Sources

Guide Cleric to specific integrations when needed:

{% code overflow="wrap" %}

```
@Cleric Using Datadog, show me error logs for checkout-service

@Cleric Check Prometheus metrics for CPU usage spikes

@Cleric Search GCP logs for timeout errors
```

{% endcode %}

## Automatic Alert Investigation

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

See [Configuring Agents and Triggers](/setup/agents-and-triggers.md) to set up automatic investigations based on keywords.

## Next Steps

Now that you've run your first investigation:

1. **Teach Cleric about your environment**
   * Accept [Memory proposals](/learning/memories.md) to help Cleric learn
   * Set up [Skills](/learning/skills.md) for environment-specific tasks
   * Configure [Global Guidance](/setup/providing-context.md) with preferences and context
2. **Automate investigations**
   * Invite Cleric to your alerts and incident channels
   * [Configure Agents and Triggers](/setup/agents-and-triggers.md) for automatic triage
3. **Explore advanced use cases**
   * See [Common Use Cases](/investigation/common-use-cases.md) for investigation patterns
   * Learn how to use Cleric for retrospectives, proactive scans, and more
4. **Add more integrations**
   * Browse [Supported Integrations](/integrations/supported-integrations.md)
   * Connect additional observability tools and data sources

## Getting Help

* **Support:** Contact <support@cleric.ai> or reach out via your dedicated Slack Connect channel


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# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation

If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.

Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:

```
GET https://docs.cleric.ai/meet-cleric/quick-start.md?ask=<question>
```

The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.

Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.