What is Keel?¶
Keel is an on-premises appliance for log analytics, observability, and AI-assisted root-cause analysis. It runs entirely inside your own network — your logs, alerts, and incident data never leave your infrastructure.
You deploy Keel as a virtual machine on your own hypervisor (VMware, KVM/Proxmox, or compatible). It ingests logs and alerts from your systems, stores and indexes them, evaluates alert rules, and uses a Large Language Model (LLM) you control to explain incidents and suggest remediations.
Who it's for¶
Teams that need modern observability and AI incident analysis but cannot send their data to a SaaS — because of data-residency rules, air-gapped or regulated environments, security policy, or cost. Keel gives you the AI-RCA experience of a cloud platform while keeping 100% of your data on-prem.
What it does¶
- Ingest logs over OpenTelemetry (OTLP), Syslog, and Fluentd; receive alerts from Alertmanager, Datadog, PagerDuty, and generic webhooks.
- Store & tier logs in a built-in column store, with hot local storage and optional cheaper S3-compatible cold storage by retention class.
- Search with a fast log browser, live tail, raw SQL, and AI Query (plain English → query).
- Alert → incident → RCA: turn alerts into incidents and generate an AI Root Cause Analysis — root cause, timeline, affected services, log evidence, and remediation — grounded in your logs and your uploaded runbooks (RAG).
- Assist: a read-only Platform Assistant answers questions and runs diagnostics in plain language.
- Forward: send processed logs onward to other systems; export professional PDF/CSV reports.
Why on-prem¶
- Data residency & privacy — nothing is sent to a third party. You bring your own LLM (a local model via Ollama, or your own Anthropic/OpenAI key).
- Works in restricted networks — including air-gapped, with offline licensing.
- Predictable cost — a licensed appliance, not per-GB SaaS billing.
How you get it¶
Keel is delivered 100% digitally as a downloadable VM image (OVA / QCOW2) from the customer portal. You import it into your hypervisor, attach a second disk for log storage, and apply your license. See the deployment guide.
Editions & licensing¶
Keel is licensed per deployment with tiered entitlements (ingest volume, AI RCA volume, node count, and features). Licenses come in connected mode (node-locked, activation-based) or air-gapped mode (annual, expiry-only). See licensing.