Wayseer

User guideWayseer 0.28.3Contents

Install and first run

Wayseer runs on Linux, under Wayland or X11, on macOS 13 or later, and on Windows 10 and 11. The macOS packages are new, and not yet tried on a Mac.

Packages

None of the packages needs Go:

Which downloads update themselves

Linux tarball, AppImage

Wayseer downloads, checks and installs them on Y, and can undo it (installing a release)

Windows portable zip

The same

Flatpak, Nix package, Windows installer

Update them the way you installed them: with Flatpak, with Nix, or with a newer installer

macOS app

From 0.28, Wayseer downloads and checks them, and on Y shows the new app in Finder for you to drag over the old one (on a Mac); not yet tried on a Mac. Before 0.28, download the newer app from wayseer.app; Wayseer tells you when one is out

The demo world

Wayseer can open a made-up company of 400 hosts, 120 services, databases, queues and their events, so you can try everything without connecting to anything:

wayseer --demo

It needs no download, no key and no network, and leaves your own config and state as they were: the demo keeps its own in a temporary folder, deleted when it quits. So each start is a first one, the tour of the keys included. --demo is new in 0.28.1.

To see what it loads without opening a window, run the modules for two seconds and print a summary of each module's state, entities by kind, entities by where their place came from (when any has one; see places), and edges by relation with how many carry traffic:

wayseer --demo --dump-world 2s
world v2: 1935 entities, 2684 edges, 29 events

module    kind      freshness  entities  note
wayseer  internal  live       4
demo      file      live       1931
...

In the window, press 1 to 5 to switch lenses (lenses), click an entity to focus it, and press Ctrl+K to find anything by name (palette). F1 hides the key hints along the bottom; Ctrl+Q quits. The first ten minutes is a guided walk through it.

Your own config

Run wayseer with no flags and it writes a default config, then opens on this machine: its host is focused (picked out, with the rest dimmed) in Topology, the map of everything, with what is linked to it in view: CPUs, memory, disks, filesystems, network interfaces, the services running on it and their processes (this machine). Wayseer's own health is there too, as the wayseer entities. Click anything to focus it, or press Enter to open the host in Detail.

A short tour of the keys shows over it, a card at a time: moving around, the lenses, finding things, time, and asking. A card sits near what it is about, so they move; rings ripple out from it while it shows. Try a card's keys, or press Enter, to move on, and Esc to end it. It shows once; Shift+F1 brings it back. The app remembers that it was seen in state.yaml, on Linux usually ~/.local/state/wayseer/state.yaml; the config and state live where each platform keeps them (where files are kept).

The status line says once that your use of Wayseer is under its end-user license, and >license.terms shows it. It asks nothing, and it says so again only when a release brings a newer version.

The default config lists both modules. To stop showing this machine, delete the kind: localhost entry, or put # before its lines; add other sources as Configuration describes. An existing config is never changed.

The localhost module runs on Linux, macOS and, from 0.28.0, Windows. A config that 0.27 wrote on Windows has the entry commented out, as the module didn't run there yet; remove the # before its two lines to show the machine.

Wayseer reads your systems and sends nothing about them anywhere. Its one request of its own is a daily fetch of Wayseer's signed list of revoked modules, the same file for everyone and sent with no identifier (checking for newer lists). On a machine that must never connect, turn it off before the first run:

revocations: {check: false}
updates: {check: false}

Flags

--config file

Use this config instead of the default one.

--demo

Open the demo world, keeping your own config and state untouched.

--help

List the flags and commands, and where to report a problem.

--print-config

Print the config file and exit.

--one-window

Start with one window, not every window open at quit.

--licenses

Print the licenses of the third-party software built in, and exit.

--license-terms

Print the Wayseer end-user license this release is under, and exit.

--version

Print the version and the date this release was built, which decides the license keys that cover it, and exit.

--undo-update

Put back the release the last update replaced, without starting the app, and exit: undoing an update.

--dump-world 2s

Run the modules without a window for that long, print a summary of the world, and exit.

--mem

With --dump-world or --bench-lenses, also print the heap, the memory the process holds, and the longest GC pause.

--bench-lenses 5s

Show each lens for that long without vsync and print frame times, to check performance. The pointer is ignored while it runs, so where it rests changes nothing.

--bench-start

Start, then print how long the first frame took, and how long until every module's data was drawn; then open a second window and close both.

wayseer bookmarks export and wayseer bookmarks import share bookmarks without opening a window: see Sharing bookmarks. wayseer dev keygen makes a module developer's key pair, and wayseer dev sign packages and signs their module: see Getting a developer certificate and Signing a module.