Schema explorer

Overview

Schema Explorer helps you unify and control the structure of your logs in Coralogix. Since logs often come from many sources with different naming conventions, inconsistencies can quickly make analysis harder.

The Schema Explorer automatically detects, highlights, and reports on these differences so you can:

• Prevent duplicate fields.
• Reduce query errors caused by inconsistent keys.
• Discover and resolve duplicate or conflicting fields.
• Provide feedback to developers when fields are misaligned.

How it works

1. Ingestion – Coralogix ingests all log fields, regardless of structure or naming convention.
2. Detection – Schema Management identifies duplicate or similar keys.
3. Analysis – You can explore how each field is used, how often it appears, and its unique values.
4. Unification – Align conflicting keys into a single schema, ensuring consistency across teams and services.

Key features

Schema Explorer provides a complete view of the fields ingested across your logs. For each field, you can see:

• Path — The field name and location.
• Description — A short, AI-generated explanation of what the field represents. See Field descriptions for details.
• Mapping status — Indexing status for the selected time range:
  • Mapped — Indexed.
  • Unmapped — Not indexed.
  • Partially mapped — Indexed for part of the time range.
• Mapping exceptions — The count of mapping exceptions, which occur when multiple applications send the same field with different data types.
• Type — Data type (string, numeric, object, and so on).
• Popularity over time — How frequently the field appears.
• Cardinality — Number of unique values and how it changes over time.
• First seen / Last seen — When the field was ingested.

This helps you identify fields that may be redundant, inconsistent, or unexpectedly missing.

Field descriptions

The Description column in the Explore tab shows a short, AI-generated description for each field, scoped per dataset (for example, default/logs or default/spans). Descriptions are generated by Olly and give you context for what a field represents without leaving Schema Explorer.

Descriptions are stored separately from schema snapshots and update instantly when edited — they do not depend on data volume or re-ingestion.

View a field description

1. Go to Data Flow → Schema Explorer and open the Explore tab.
2. Find the field in the grid and read its description in the Description column.
3. If the description is truncated, hover over or select the field to view the full text.

Edit a field description

You can correct or replace AI-generated descriptions for user-defined fields. OpenTelemetry (OTEL) and system-defined fields are read-only — their descriptions are canonical and cannot be edited.

To edit a description:

1. In the Description column, select the description for a user-defined field. The Edit description modal opens.
2. Update the text.
3. Select Save.

Your edit persists across sessions and is reflected in Olly's subsequent analysis of the field. Olly does not overwrite user-edited descriptions.

OTEL and system fields

Fields defined by OpenTelemetry conventions or reserved by the system show a lock indicator in the Description column and open in read-only view when selected. This ensures well-known standard fields stay consistent across teams.

User-defined fields — any field your applications send that is not part of the OTEL or system set — are editable.

Example scenario

You have three services sending user data:

• Service A uses surname
• Service B uses familyname
• Service C uses family-name

Without Schema Management, your queries might miss data because the fields don’t match. With Schema Management, you can detect these variations and map them to a unified key such as last_name.

UI walkthrough

1. Go to Data Flow → Schema Explorer.
2. Use the search bar to find specific fields.
3. Review each field's description, popularity, type, mapping status, and cardinality to identify duplicates or inconsistencies.
4. Select a description in the Description column to view or edit field descriptions.
5. Use Mapping Exceptions to align similar fields into a single schema.

Best practices

• Regularly check for new fields ingested to catch inconsistent naming early.
• Standardize field names with your development teams to reduce mapping exceptions.
• Reserve fields for critical identifiers that must remain consistent across services.

To take schema governance a step further, Coralogix provides Reserved Fields which are a way to explicitly define the fields that matter most for your queries, alerts, and dashboards. While Schema Explorer helps you discover and analyze fields, Reserved Fields let you lock in critical ones, ensuring they are always indexed with the correct type and available for use.

Next steps

Explicitly define fields of importance for querying and monitoring with Reserved fields.