Pre-Commit Smoke Test

End-to-end verification that the observe-agent binary on the current branch can start, collect log telemetry, and deliver it to the Observe backend.

Prerequisites

• The observe-agent config at /etc/observe-agent/observe-agent.yaml must

exist with valid token and observe_url fields.

• The config must have host_monitoring.logs.enabled: true with an include glob

that covers /var/log/**/*.log.

• If no config file exists for you to refer to, inform the user, and halt execution immediately.
• The Observe MCP server (user-observe) must be connected for backend

verification.

Step 1: Build or locate the binary

Check if a freshly built observe-agent binary exists in the project root:

ls -la observe-agent

If the binary is missing or stale (older than the latest source change), build it:

make build

Step 2: Stop any running agent

Ensure no existing agent is holding the health-check port or file-storage locks:

sudo systemctl stop observe-agent 2>/dev/null || true

Step 3: Start the agent

Launch the agent in the background with the local config. Set OTELLOGLEVEL since the config references it via ${env:OTELLOGLEVEL}:

sudo OTEL_LOG_LEVEL=info ./observe-agent \
  --observe-config /etc/observe-agent/observe-agent.yaml start

Run this as a background shell command (blockuntilms: 0) with required_permissions: ["all"] so the agent can read /var/log/ and bind privileged ports.

Step 4: Confirm startup

Wait ~10 seconds, then verify:

1. Search the agent output for `Everything is ready. Begin running and

processing data.` to confirm successful startup.

1. Hit the health endpoint:

curl -s http://localhost:13133/status

Expected response: {"status":"Server available", ...}. If startup failed, check the agent output for errors and report them to the user.

Step 5: Generate smoke telemetry

Write distinctly identifiable log lines into a path the filelog receiver will pick up. Use a unique marker with a Unix timestamp so the data can be queried unambiguously:

SMOKE_MARKER="OBSERVE_SMOKE_TEST_$(date +%s)"
sudo mkdir -p /var/log/smoke-test
for i in $(seq 1 10); do
  echo "{\"timestamp\": \"$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%3NZ)\", \
\"level\": \"INFO\", \
\"message\": \"${SMOKE_MARKER} line ${i} - smoke test\", \
\"service\": \"smoke-test\", \
\"line_number\": ${i}}" \
  | sudo tee -a /var/log/smoke-test/smoke-test.log > /dev/null
  sleep 0.5
done

After writing, confirm the agent detected the file by searching its output for: Started watching file.*smoke-test.log

Step 6: Wait for export

Wait 30-45 seconds for the agent to poll the file, batch the logs, and export them to the Observe backend. During this time, verify the agent is still healthy:

curl -s http://localhost:13133/status

Also check the agent output for any Exporting failed errors. A few Failed to open file errors for stale checkpoint paths (e.g. old k8s pod logs) are harmless and expected on non-k8s hosts.

Step 7: Query the Observe backend

Use the Observe MCP generate-query-card tool to verify the smoke test logs reached the backend:

Tool: generate-query-card
Prompt: "Show me logs from the last 10 minutes that contain
  'OBSERVE_SMOKE_TEST' in the log body from host <hostname>"

Replace <hostname> with the host's FQDN (visible in the agent's resourcedetection output, e.g. ip-0-1-2-3.us-east-2.compute.internal).

Interpret results

When logs are confirmed, report to the user:

• Number of log lines found (expected: 10)
• Source file path (/var/log/smoke-test/smoke-test.log)
• Resource attributes present (cloud metadata, host info, deployment env)
• Ingestion latency (time between log write and backend timestamp)
• Link to the Observe worksheet (included in the MCP response)

Step 8: Clean up

After verification, stop the agent:

sudo kill $(pgrep -f 'observe-agent.*start') 2>/dev/null || true

Optionally remove the smoke test log:

sudo rm -rf /var/log/smoke-test

Failure Troubleshooting