Observability

What you will learn

• How to use the health endpoint for liveness and readiness probes
• How to scrape Prometheus metrics from a running worker
• How to emit CloudEvents during workflow execution
• How to control log verbosity

Health checks

Zigflow exposes an HTTP health endpoint while the worker is running:

GET http://localhost:3000/health

Returns 200 OK when the worker is healthy. Use this for liveness and readiness probes in any orchestration system.

Change the address with --health-listen-address (default 0.0.0.0:3000).

Kubernetes

The Helm chart configures liveness and readiness probes automatically. No additional configuration is needed for standard deployments.

Docker Compose

healthcheck:
  test: ["CMD-SHELL", "curl -f http://localhost:3000/health || exit 1"]
  interval: 10s
  timeout: 5s
  retries: 3

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Prometheus metrics

Zigflow exposes Prometheus metrics at:

http://localhost:9090/metrics

Change the address with --metrics-listen-address (default 0.0.0.0:9090).

Use --metrics-prefix to add a prefix to all metric names.

CloudEvents metrics

Metric	Labels	Description
zigflow_events_emitted_total	client, type	Total events emitted per client and event type
zigflow_events_undelivered_total	client, type	Events that failed to deliver
zigflow_events_emit_duration_seconds	client, type	Emit duration histogram

These metrics are only populated when a CloudEvents configuration is active.

Scraping in Kubernetes

When using the Helm chart, add a Prometheus scrape annotation to the pod:

values.yaml

podAnnotations:
  prometheus.io/scrape: "true"
  prometheus.io/port: "9090"
  prometheus.io/path: "/metrics"

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CloudEvents

tip

For full configuration options, event structure, file output examples and debugging guidance, see Debugging workflows.

Zigflow can emit CloudEvents v1.0 at key points during workflow execution. This is the primary mechanism for real-time observability into running workflows.

Enable it by providing a configuration file:

zigflow run -f workflow.yaml --cloudevents-config ./cloudevents.yaml

Configuration file

cloudevents.yaml

clients:
  - name: file-logger
    protocol: file
    target: ./tmp/events

  - name: http-sink
    protocol: http
    target: "{{ .env.HTTP_EVENTS_URL }}"
    options:
      timeout: 5s
      method: POST

The target field supports Go template syntax with access to environment variables via .env.

Supported protocols

Protocol	Target format	Notes
file	Directory path	Events written as YAML, one file per workflow execution
http	HTTP URL	Events sent as POST requests

Event types

Event type	Emitted when
dev.zigflow.workflow.started	A workflow execution begins
dev.zigflow.workflow.completed	A workflow execution completes successfully
dev.zigflow.task.started	A task begins
dev.zigflow.task.retried	A task is retried after failure
dev.zigflow.task.cancelled	A task is cancelled
dev.zigflow.task.faulted	A task fails
dev.zigflow.task.completed	A task completes successfully
dev.zigflow.iteration.completed	A task iteration completes

Important notes

• CloudEvents are emitted on a best-effort basis.
• A failed event delivery does not fail the workflow.
• Event emission must remain within Temporal's determinism constraints.
• For high-throughput workflows, set appropriate HTTP timeouts to avoid workflow delays.

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Logging

Control log verbosity with --log-level:

zigflow run -f workflow.yaml --log-level debug

Valid values: trace, debug, info, warn, error. The code default is info. If the LOG_LEVEL environment variable is set, that value takes precedence.

Logs are structured JSON, written to stderr.

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Related pages

• Deploying overview — runtime ports and configuration
• Docker — Docker and Compose configuration
• Kubernetes — Helm chart deployment
• Debugging workflows — CloudEvents in detail