quickstart.md

Quickstart

This walkthrough takes you from a freshly installed dash0 CLI to running your first commands against a Dash0 environment in about five minutes. It assumes you have already installed the CLI.

1. Log in

Authenticate against your Dash0 environment:

dash0 login --profile default --api-url https://api.eu-west-1.aws.dash0.com

Replace the URL with the Dash0 region your organization uses — see the Dash0 API endpoints settings page for the exact URL.

If the default profile does not exist yet, the command prompts to create it and marks it as OAuth-authenticated. It then opens your browser, walks through OAuth 2.0 with PKCE, and saves the access token to that profile. Once you have one profile, subsequent dash0 login calls without --profile refresh the active profile.

If you cannot use an interactive login (for example in a CI runner or an AI agent session), set DASH0_AUTH_TOKEN to a static auth_* token instead — see the login reference for the full authentication story.

2. Confirm the active profile

dash0 config show

The output shows the resolved API URL, OTLP URL, dataset, and auth-token metadata for the profile the CLI will use.

3. List some assets

Try listing the dashboards you can see:

dash0 dashboards list

The same pattern works for every other asset type — views, check-rules, synthetic-checks, recording-rules, notification-channels, spam-filters.

For structured output (useful in scripts and agent workflows):

dash0 dashboards list -o json

4. Query telemetry

Run a query for the most recent logs:

dash0 logs query --from now-15m

Narrow to a specific service:

dash0 logs query --from now-15m --filter "service.name is my-service"

The same time-range, filter, and column flags apply to dash0 spans query, dash0 metrics instant, and dash0 failed-checks query.

5. Send a deployment event

Emit a log event announcing that a deployment happened:

dash0 logs send "Deployment v1.0 completed" \
    --event-name dash0.deployment \
    --severity-number 9 \
    --resource-attribute service.name=my-service \
    --resource-attribute deployment.environment.name=production \
    --log-attribute deployment.status=succeeded

Note

dash0 logs send — like every OTLP send command — needs a static auth_* token; the Dash0 OTLP ingress does not accept OAuth access tokens. If you logged in with dash0 login, get an auth token and either pass --auth-token auth_<...> for this call or set DASH0_AUTH_TOKEN=auth_<...> in your environment. See Send commands for the full story.

The event surfaces in the Dash0 UI's deployment stream and can be correlated with the traces and logs that follow it.

Where to next

• Command Reference — full syntax and examples for every command.
• GitHub Actions — run the CLI from CI/CD workflows.