About Ivy
Ivy is an open-source (MIT) observability tool for AWS Lambda. It exists because debugging a Lambda function should mean reading what the invocation actually did, and because the one reading it is increasingly a coding agent.
Why Ivy
Serverless teams often end up with one of two things: a broad platform that is expensive and complex for a handful of Lambda functions, or CloudWatch logs and guesswork. Ivy sits in between. It records every invocation with its payloads and AWS calls, shows failures that never reach your code, and keeps the price per invocation low.
Coding agents changed what an observability tool is for. Your agent already has the code; what it lacks is production. Ivy gives it the failing request, the payload that caused it and the stack trace, through an MCP server and an HTTP API, and lets it set Ivy up from a single prompt.
Principles
- Open source. The layer, the API, the dashboard and the MCP server are MIT licensed at github.com/ivytrace/ivy. The hosted service runs the same images.
- Small and focused. Lambda first, Node.js first, done well, rather than everything at once.
- Cheap to run. A healthy invocation is one trace and nothing more. Failures add data only when they happen.
- Standards. OpenTelemetry in, OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, OIDC for sign-in.
- Agent-native. No CLI, no click-only flows: everything is available through MCP or the HTTP API.
- Honest about gaps. The features page lists what Ivy doesn't do yet.
Hosted and self-hosted
ivytrace.dev is the hosted version: free for 100,000 traces a month per workspace, then €5 per million. Or run it yourself with docker compose up (self-hosting).
Get in touch
Questions, bugs and ideas go to GitHub issues.