Create an Application

An Application represents a production system, service, website, API, or digital product whose operational state is managed by RuntimeHQ. Each application has its own runtime key, operational state, incidents, maintenance windows, and capabilities.

When you create an application, you receive a Runtime Key for both your production and non-production environments.

Defining application capabilities is optional but highly recommended. An Application Capability represents a discrete business function within an application that can have its own operational state. Examples include Payments, Search, Claims, or Notifications. This allows you to have granular operational control over each specific capability rather than just the entire application.

Consume Live State

Use our Runtime SDKs in your application to consume the live operational state. Refer to our SDK setup guides to get started.

If an SDK is unavailable for your tech stack, you can directly consume the Runtime API.

The Runtime SDKs and APIs both require the runtimeKey you obtained in the previous step. It is entirely up to you how you want your application to react to different operational states and affected capabilities. Our Github SDK repos has multiple examples examples for different scenarios.

Test Your Integration

You should test your integration in a non-production environment first.

Under your application's Integration tab in the Console, there is a Simulate button. You can choose a simulation state (Outage, Degraded, or Maintenance), select affected capabilities, and write an optional customer-facing message.

Within a few seconds, the simulated state will propagate to your application runnin on non-production environment without affecting your live production users.

Production Operation

State changes in your production environment happen only by declaring an Incident or scheduling a Maintenance Window.

An Incident ties to one or more applications and their capabilities. Resolving an incident recalculates the live operational state for each application, instantly bringing back the normal operational state (provided there are no other affecting incidents or active maintenance windows).

Invite Your Team

Invite other members from your organization who participate in incidents and need to control application operational states, such as Platform Engineering, SRE Teams, Incident Commanders, or Engineering Operations.

Navigate to the Organization page in the Console (located at the bottom of the left sidebar), and click the Invite User button.