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new 5e233ea5062 Blog: Meet Horizon UI 11/17 — Runtime Rules & Live
Debugging (#877)
5e233ea5062 is described below
commit 5e233ea506209c85ee7602146177bbfbd8e5d0cc
Author: 吴晟 Wu Sheng <[email protected]>
AuthorDate: Mon Jun 29 17:59:44 2026 +0800
Blog: Meet Horizon UI 11/17 — Runtime Rules & Live Debugging (#877)
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+---
+title: "Meet Horizon UI · 11/17: Runtime Rules & Live Debugging"
+date: 2026-06-29
+author: Sheng Wu
+description: "Part 11 of the Meet Horizon UI series: edit SkyWalking's
OAL/MAL/LAL analysis rules in the browser and hot-apply them to the running
cluster with a fenced, recoverable rollout — then step those same rules against
live data in the three-tab Live Debugger to see exactly what they compute."
+tags:
+ - Engineering
+ - Metrics
+---
+
+This is the eleventh post in the [Meet Horizon
UI](/blog/2026-06-21-skywalking-horizon-ui-introduction/) series, and it stays
in **Act 3 — operate it**. The [previous
post](/blog/2026-06-29-horizon-ui-alarms-and-incident-triage/) was about
reading what the backend already decided; this one is about changing *how* it
decides — and then proving the change does what you meant.
+
+Almost everything OAP computes runs through a small family of DSLs: **OAL**
turns traces into service and endpoint metrics, **MAL** turns meters
(OpenTelemetry, Telegraf) into metrics, **LAL** turns logs into tags and
metrics. Traditionally you edit those as YAML on the server and restart.
Horizon brings both halves into the console — **edit and hot-apply the rules**,
and **debug them against live data** — two capabilities new to the SkyWalking
UI that ride OAP's admin host.
+
+## Your rules, live in the console
+
+**Operate → DSL management** lists every analysis rule the cluster is running,
grouped by source. Four catalogs are editable — **MAL · OTel**, **MAL ·
Telegraf**, **LAL**, and **LAL → MAL** (log-to-metric) — plus a read-only
**OAL** browser. Rules group by prefix (ActiveMQ, BanyanDB, Elasticsearch,
Flink…), each tagged by status, and you can filter by **active / inactive /
bundled / modified** to see at a glance what an operator has changed versus
what shipped.
+
+
+Figure 1: DSL management — every OAL/MAL/LAL rule the cluster runs, grouped by
source and filterable by status (active / inactive / bundled / modified). Here,
the OpenTelemetry MAL catalog: 37 bundled rules.</br>
+
+## Edit, and hot-apply safely
+
+Open a rule and it's a Monaco YAML editor with syntax highlighting and two
diff modes — **vs. server** (what's live) and **vs. bundled** (what shipped) —
so you always see what you're about to change. The green ▶ in the gutter beside
each `- name:` jumps that rule straight into the Live Debugger.
+
+
+Figure 2: Edit a rule as Monaco YAML — syntax-highlighted, with diffs against
the live (server) and bundled versions, and a green ▶ in the gutter that jumps
the rule into the Live Debugger.</br>
+
+Saving is where the care shows. A body- or filter-only edit applies instantly.
But a **structural** change — one that moves a metric's scope, downsampling, or
storage shape — reshapes the cluster's storage, so Horizon runs it as a fenced
rollout and tracks it on screen: **Compiled → Confirming across the cluster →
Committing → Done**, reporting success only once the change is durable. If a
node lags the fence, the apply ends **DEGRADED** — it names the laggard nodes
(they self-converge o [...]
+
+## The Live Debugger: see what a rule actually does
+
+Editing a rule is the easy part. The hard part — the part that used to mean
reading code and squinting at output — is knowing what a rule *computes*
against your real data. **Operate → Live debugger** answers that directly: pick
a rule, click **start sampling**, and Horizon installs a bounded capture on
**every reachable OAP node**, grabs a handful of real records, and shows each
one stepped through the rule.
+
+
+Figure 3: Start a capture and it installs on every reachable OAP node (here
2/2), grabs real records, and bounds itself with a record cap and a retention
window — the same shell serves all three analysis languages.</br>
+
+It has one tab per analysis language, because each works on a different kind
of data.
+
+**OAL → traces.** A captured source row — a real trace segment — flows clause
by clause: `from(Service.*)` reads the segment (you see its latency, status,
endpoint), `build_metrics` shapes it, `cpm()` aggregates it. You watch a trace
become a metric.
+
+
+Figure 4: OAL → traces — a real segment from `agent::gateway` (latency 38,
status 200, `/rcmd`) stepped clause by clause, `from(Service.*)` →
`build_metrics` → `cpm()`, into the service-CPM metric it feeds.</br>
+
+**MAL → metrics.** A meter sample flows input → filter → function → output.
Because one metric fans out into many label-sets, the samples are grouped by
metric, and a **diff** dims the labels every sample shares and highlights only
the ones that differ.
+
+
+Figure 5: MAL → metrics — samples grouped by metric, with a diff that dims the
16 labels every sample shares and lights only the two that differ (`group`,
`pod_name`), so four near-identical series read apart at a glance.</br>
+
+**LAL → logs.** Each captured log record becomes a column and each DSL block
(or statement) a row, so the whole capture reads as a matrix: you can see which
records the `filter` **aborted** and what the `extractor` pulled out of the
ones that passed.
+
+
+Figure 6: LAL → logs — every captured record a column, every DSL block a row.
This filter aborts the normal logs (only abnormal ones pass) before the
extractor pulls out `status.code` and `response.flag`.</br>
+
+## Where it runs
+
+Both surfaces are **operate** features: they talk to OAP's **admin host**, not
the query port — DSL management through the `receiver-runtime-rule` module, the
Live Debugger through `dsl-debugging`. That admin host ships with OAP 11, so on
today's backend these two pages surface a clear "needs the admin host / module"
banner and stay read-only, while every observe surface — dashboards, traces,
logs, alarms, profiling — keeps working untouched. Access is role-gated:
browsing rules and view [...]
+
+## Where to go next
+
+For the field reference — every apply state, the dump format, the per-tab
capture controls — see the [Runtime
Rules](https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/skywalking-horizon-ui/next/operate/runtime-rules/)
and [Live
Debugger](https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/skywalking-horizon-ui/next/operate/live-debugger/)
docs.
+
+Next up: **Inspect — Cross-Layer Query Power-Tools** — the Operate-side
surfaces for running metric, trace, and log queries straight across every layer.
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