Glossary
Words in icLens, in plain terms. For the Internet Computer itself (canisters, principals, cycles, subnets), see the Internet Computer documentation.
Workspaces and people
Section titled “Workspaces and people”- This browser: Your personal workspace. Its canister list is kept on this device.
- Agent: A canister you own that runs icLens for your team: it keeps a shared canister list, watches it, stores its telemetry and carries out work you configure. Not to be confused with an IC SDK agent or the AI assistant.
- Agent workspace: The workspace an Agent backs: its shared list, history, rules and people.
- Run as: Who carries out an action: You, with your own identity, or an Agent. Every review shows it before you confirm.
- Roles: What a member may do in an Agent: Read-only, Read-write or Admin.
- Observe and Control: How much an Agent may do with a canister. Observe reads its status; Control also lets the Agent change it.
Signals and telemetry
Section titled “Signals and telemetry”- Signal: One kind of information about a canister: Health, Logs, Metrics, Traces or Availability. The coverage line under a canister’s name shows each one’s state.
- Receiving, Waiting for first data, Stale: Signal states: data is arriving; it is set up but nothing has arrived yet; it stopped arriving.
- Data connection: A store for Metrics, Logs or Traces, inside your Agent or in a separate storage canister.
- Sender: A canister, frontend or service that writes to a data connection.
- Collector: A canister managed by your Agent that receives and keeps a frontend’s measurements, errors, events and timelines. Find it under that frontend; access follows People.
- Issue: A retained group of approved errors with the same fingerprint. Its estimated seen count and exact retained affected sessions are different populations.
- Example: One retained browser page load or action that provides evidence behind an aggregate figure or issue.
- Timeline: The ordered steps of one example. Continue in canister requires carried context and matching canister records; a missing continuation is explicit.
- Visitor: A recognized browser in the retained whole-day accounting report, rather than an identified person. Several days’ unique visitors are counted once.
- Trace and span: A trace follows one request through your canisters; each step in it is a span.
- Exemplar: A dot on a metric chart that links one measurement to the trace it came from.
- Availability check: A call the Agent makes to a canister from outside, on a schedule, to see if it answers.
Monitor and cycles
Section titled “Monitor and cycles”- Monitor: The Agent’s scheduler: it reads your canisters, evaluates alert rules and runs automatic top-ups. One switch turns it on or off.
- Alert rule: A condition Monitor checks, such as “balance below 1 TC”, and who to tell.
- Receiver: Where an alert goes: a Slack channel or an HTTPS webhook.
- Reserve: The Agent’s own cycles account that pays for automatic top-ups.
- Runway: Roughly how long a canister’s cycles last at its current burn.
- TC: A trillion cycles.
Changes and recovery
Section titled “Changes and recovery”- Review: The step before any change: it shows the target, who runs it and what it costs. Nothing happens until you confirm.
- Snapshot: A recovery point of a canister’s code and memory.
- Uncertain outcome: A change was sent but its reply was lost, so it may or may not have happened. icLens checks before it lets you try again.