See what's actually happening inside your NATS system

The trial is self-serve. Download the Insights binary, activate it with the trial key emailed to you, point it at your NATS system with system account credentials, and you're up and running. Insights is read-only but if you're not ready or able to connect to your NATS system, you can test-drive Insights with the built-in simulator.

At the conclusion of the trial, Insights stops collecting new data. Contact Synadia to upgrade and re-activate Insights. Pricing is based on node count and structured as an annual agreement. We will work with you to find the right plan for your environment.

Insights complements your existing monitoring stack, providing granular NATS visibility that other tools can't. Insights shows you the specific NATS entities (connections, streams, consumers, etc) and configuration changes that are driving spikes and alerts in the dashboards of your other monitoring tools.

OpenTelemetry traces what your application can observe. Insights captures the internal state of your NATS system at regular intervals (no instrumentation required). When an OTel trace shows something unexpected in a NATS interaction, use the timestamp to look up what the NATS system looked like at that interval in Insights. The only metadata your trace needs is a stream or consumer name; Insights fills in everything else.

Grafana with nats-surveyor gives you the what: time-series charts of numerical metrics. Insights gives you the why: which specific client, which stream, which account is causing the problem, and when the behavior started. Grafana tells you throughput spiked. Insights tells you connection X on account Y started publishing at 10x its normal rate 20 minutes ago.

They solve different but complementary problems. Control Plane manages your NATS deployment — assets, authN/authZ, and configuration — and gives you a high-level view of system activity. Insights is purpose-built for deep monitoring and diagnostics: entity-level navigation, high-cardinality data, and built-in checks tuned for NATS semantics.

Control Plane is read-write: you use it to change the system. Insights is read-only: it tells you what's happening inside the system, and why. Most teams running NATS in production use both.

In short: Control Plane helps you operate your NATS system. Insights helps you understand it.

The only requirements: NATS Server v2.10+ and system account credentials. Insights supports NATS servers using either config mode or operator mode. Insights runs on Mac, Windows, or Linux and, by default, runs as a single binary. It can be run on a local machine or deployed as a service. Learn more about deployment options here.

No. Insights is a standalone offering that does not depend on any other product or service other than NATS itself.

No. Because Insights requires access to system credentials, Cloud customers cannot connect Synadia Insights to their Cloud account. If you are a Cloud customer with NATS monitoring or observability questions, please contact us.

Insights indexes everything a NATS system account can observe: server state, cluster topology, route health, connection metadata, connection-level statistics, subject-level message counts, JetStream asset state, account-level usage, and all entity relationships.

Insights is read-only and cannot edit configurations or create/delete entities. It cannot access message payloads or stream data. It does index stream and subject names.