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Integrating Tailcall with Apollo Studio

This guide illustrates how to configure tailcall to send usage metrics to Apollo Studio.

Creating a monolith graph

  1. Before you configure tailcall, you will need to create a Monolith graph on Apollo Studio.

    home.png

  2. Go to your organization's home page and click on Create your first graph, if this is your first graph or Create New Graph if you have existing graphs.

    create-graph.png

  3. Change the Graph title, Graph ID and other fields as desired and make sure to change Graph Architecture to Monolith, assuming tailcall is booted in monolith mode.

  4. Once you are done, click on Next. You'll see the following screen.

    insert-gql-schema.png

  5. Copy the fields APOLLO_KEY and APOLLO_GRAPH_REF as they are required by tailcall to be able to send the usage metrics.

  6. Next we need to connect Apollo with our running instance of Tailcall. There are two ways to let Apollo know about your GraphQL schema:

    1. Navigate to Local Introspection. If you have a deployed instance of your GraphQL server you can put the URL pointing to that in Endpoint URL and click on Introspect and Upload. If not, start a local instance of tailcall and put the local url here, similar to how is shown in the image below. You can start a local instance of Tailcall by running tailcall start (click here to know more).

      local-introspection.png

    2. Or, Navigate to Local Schema and insert your schema generated by tailcall and click Upload. You can get the schema by running tailcall check (click here to know more).

      local-schema.png

You have now created a Monolith graph in Apollo Studio. The next step is to configure tailcall to use the APOLLO_API_KEY and APOLLO_GRAPH_REF. Follow detailed instructions here.

Checking the metrics in Apollo Studio

To see the metrics for you queries follow these instructions:

  1. Start tailcall with the appropriate configuration for Apollo (click here to know more). Below is an example of what a config may look like:

    schema
    @server(port: 8000)
    @telemetry(
    export: {
    apollo: {
    apiKey: "<APOLLO_API_KEY from Apollo Website>"
    graphRef: "<APOLLO_GRAPH_REF from Apollo Website>"
    }
    }
    ) {
    query: Query
    }

    type Query {
    posts: [Post]
    @http(
    url: "http://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts"
    )
    }

    type Post {
    id: Int!
    userId: Int!
    title: String!
    body: String!
    }
  2. Visit http://localhost:8000/graphql and create a query with an appropriate name (below is an example query named MyQuery) and run it multiple times to send the metrics to Apollo Studio.

    tip

    Naming the query is not required to be able to send the metrics, but it helps to organize the metrics with appropriate names when viewed in Apollo Studio.

    query MyQuery {
    posts {
    id
    title
    }
    }
  3. To see the metrics click on the VARIANT NAME of your graph. In the example below, the variant name is current.

    graph-home.png

  4. You will see the following page. From here click on insights icon as highlighted on the left side of the image.

    insights-nav.png

  5. You will now be able to see all the information related to your queries here

    insights.png

    insights-graph.png

important

If you don't see the name of your query here, try running the query multiple times and waiting for some time. Since the metric isn't sent to Apollo Studio for each query, instead they are batched together and sent at once for efficiency reasons.