# Operations

**URL:** https://heroiclabs.com/docs/heroic-cloud/operations/
**Summary:** Once your game is running on Heroic Cloud, you need visibility into how it's performing and tools to act on what you see. This section covers the observability and operational tooling available to you.
**Keywords:** operations, heroic cloud
**Categories:** heroic-cloud, operations

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# Operations and observability

Once your game is running on Heroic Cloud, you need visibility into how it's performing and tools to act on what you see. Heroic Cloud provides built-in monitoring, logging, and data export for every Nakama deployment. For studios that need deeper integration with their own observability stack, the add-ons extend these capabilities with continuous log shipping, Prometheus-compatible metric endpoints, read-only database replicas, and application profiling.

## What's included with every deployment

Every Nakama deployment comes with the following at no additional cost:

* **Graphs** showing time-series performance data: load balancer request counts, CPU and memory utilization per node, database CPU, and database query load. See [Dashboard metrics and logs](./dashboard-metrics-logs/).
* **Logs** with full-text search, severity filtering, date range selection, and one-time export. All logs are in UTC. See [Dashboard metrics and logs](./dashboard-metrics-logs/).
* **Top database queries** surfacing the most expensive SQL queries with an impact indicator to identify optimization targets.
* **Audit trail** tracking every user action on the deployment: who deployed, who scaled, who changed configuration. See [Audit log](../organizations/audit-log/).
* **Data export** for downloading a complete PostgreSQL snapshot of your deployment's database at any time. See [Data exporting](./data-exporting/).

## Additional add-ons

For studios that run their own observability platforms or need capabilities beyond the built-in tools:

* **Log exporting** ships logs to an S3 bucket in near real-time (20-30 second delay) as JSON. Ingest into Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog, Grafana Loki, or any platform that reads from S3. See [Log exporting](./log-exporting/).
* **Metric exporting** provides a Prometheus-conforming endpoint you scrape every minute. Includes Nakama application metrics and any custom metrics you emit from your game module. Plot in Grafana or any compatible tool. See [Metric exporting](./metric-exporting/).
* **Database replica** gives you a read-only database accessible over the internet for querying production data without impacting performance. See [Additional add-ons](./additional-addons/).
* **Profiling** provides application-level profiling for your Nakama instances. See [Additional add-ons](./additional-addons/).

To enable any add-on, contact Heroic Labs ([support@heroiclabs.com](mailto:support@heroiclabs.com)). See [Billing](../organizations/billing-support/) for how add-on charges work.

## When to use what

{{< table name="heroic-cloud.concepts.operations.tools-decision-matrix" >}}

## Disaster recovery

Heroic Cloud automatically backs up your database daily and replicates data across availability zones for high availability deployments. See [Disaster recovery and backups](./disaster-recovery/).

## Load testing

Before going live, validate your deployment's performance under realistic load. Development instances can't be used for load testing. See [Load test your Nakama deployment](./load-testing/).

## See also

* [Scaling](../introduction/scaling/) for resource tiers and when to scale.
* [Nakama deployments](../titles/nakama-deployments/) for the Graphs, Logs, and Data Export tabs.