Recommended Setup¶

After installing HolmesGPT and running your first investigation, connect your data sources so Holmes can perform deeper investigations.

How Holmes Works¶

HolmesGPT is an AI troubleshooting agent that investigates issues by pulling data from your existing observability stack. The more data sources you connect, the more thoroughly Holmes can investigate — correlating metrics with logs, tracing infrastructure changes to application failures, and building a complete picture of what went wrong.

Holmes works across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. If you use Kubernetes, the Kubernetes toolsets are enabled automatically. But Kubernetes is not required — Holmes works equally well with Prometheus, Datadog, Elasticsearch, AWS, GCP, databases, and many other data sources. Configure the toolsets that match your stack.

1. Connect a Metrics Provider¶

Metrics give Holmes visibility into trends over time. Without metrics, Holmes can still investigate using logs and infrastructure state, but it won't be able to spot gradual degradation or correlate historical information as well. Metrics are also critical to answering numerical questions, like 'what is the error rate for service xyz?'

Connect whichever metrics platform you already use:

Platform	Setup Guide	Notes
Prometheus	Setup	Most common. Works with self-hosted, Grafana Cloud (Mimir), AWS AMP, Azure Managed Prometheus, Google Managed Prometheus, and Coralogix PromQL
Datadog	Setup	Enable `datadog/metrics` (and optionally `datadog/logs`, `datadog/traces`, `datadog/general`)
New Relic	Setup	Uses NRQL for metrics, traces, and logs in one toolset
Coralogix	Setup	For Coralogix-native log and metrics queries

Quick example (Prometheus):

Holmes CLI Holmes Helm Chart Robusta Helm Chart

Add the following to ~/.holmes/config.yaml. Create the file if it doesn't exist:

toolsets:
  prometheus/metrics:
    enabled: true
    config:
      prometheus_url: http://prometheus-server.monitoring:9090

When using the standalone Holmes Helm Chart, update your values.yaml:

toolsets:
  prometheus/metrics:
    enabled: true
    config:
      prometheus_url: http://prometheus-server.monitoring:9090

Apply the configuration:

helm upgrade holmes holmes/holmes --values=values.yaml

When using the Robusta Helm Chart (which includes HolmesGPT), update your generated_values.yaml:

holmes:
  toolsets:
    prometheus/metrics:
      enabled: true
      config:
        prometheus_url: http://prometheus-server.monitoring:9090

Apply the configuration:

helm upgrade robusta robusta/robusta --values=generated_values.yaml --set clusterName=<YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME>

2. Connect Centralized Logging¶

Centralized logging gives Holmes access to historical logs, cross-service log correlation, and full-text search across your environment. This is especially important for investigating issues where logs from the affected service are no longer available — crashed processes, terminated containers, rotated log files, or services running on VMs and bare metal.

Platform	Setup Guide	Notes
Loki	Setup	Can connect through Grafana or directly
Elasticsearch / OpenSearch	Setup	`elasticsearch/data` for log search, `elasticsearch/cluster` for cluster health
Datadog Logs	Setup	Enable `datadog/logs` alongside metrics
Splunk	Setup	Via MCP server

Quick example (Loki via Grafana):

Holmes CLI Holmes Helm Chart Robusta Helm Chart

Add the following to ~/.holmes/config.yaml. Create the file if it doesn't exist:

toolsets:
  grafana/loki:
    enabled: true
    config:
      api_key: <your-grafana-token>
      api_url: https://your-grafana.net
      grafana_datasource_uid: <loki-datasource-uid>

When using the standalone Holmes Helm Chart, update your values.yaml:

toolsets:
  grafana/loki:
    enabled: true
    config:
      api_key: <your-grafana-token>
      api_url: https://your-grafana.net
      grafana_datasource_uid: <loki-datasource-uid>

Apply the configuration:

helm upgrade holmes holmes/holmes --values=values.yaml

When using the Robusta Helm Chart (which includes HolmesGPT), update your generated_values.yaml:

holmes:
  toolsets:
    grafana/loki:
      enabled: true
      config:
        api_key: <your-grafana-token>
        api_url: https://your-grafana.net
        grafana_datasource_uid: <loki-datasource-uid>

Apply the configuration:

helm upgrade robusta robusta/robusta --values=generated_values.yaml --set clusterName=<YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME>

3. Connect Your Cloud Provider¶

Cloud provider access lets Holmes investigate infrastructure-level causes — misconfigured security groups, IAM permission changes, database failovers, load balancer issues, DNS misconfigurations, or resource quota limits. Many production incidents involve changes at the infrastructure layer that aren't visible from application metrics or logs alone.

Platform	Setup Guide	Notes
AWS	Setup	Read-only access to EC2, RDS, ELB, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and more via MCP server
GCP	Setup	Logging, monitoring, traces, gcloud CLI, and storage via MCP server
Azure	Setup	Azure resource management via MCP server

4. Connect Distributed Tracing (if applicable)¶

If your applications emit traces, connecting a tracing backend lets Holmes follow requests across services, pinpoint slow spans, and correlate latency spikes with specific upstream or downstream calls.

Platform	Setup Guide	Notes
Grafana Tempo	Setup	Connect via Grafana or directly
Datadog Traces	Setup	Enable `datadog/traces` alongside metrics and logs
New Relic	Setup	NRQL covers traces, metrics, and logs in one toolset

5. Connect Source Control¶

Source control access lets Holmes correlate incidents with recent code changes, investigate CI/CD failures, and read PR context when diagnosing regressions.

Platform	Setup Guide	Notes
GitHub	Setup	Personal Access Token or GitHub App. Supports GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise Server

6. Connect ServiceNow (if applicable)¶

If you use ServiceNow for incident or change management, connecting it lets Holmes pull related tickets, recent changes, and CMDB context into investigations.

Platform	Setup Guide
ServiceNow	Setup

Verify Your Setup¶

After configuring your data sources, verify everything is connected:

# List all enabled toolsets
holmes toolset list

# Test with a real investigation
holmes ask "what is the health of my environment?"

Next Steps¶

Browse all built-in toolsets for the full list of integrations, or see custom toolsets to add your own.