Oxynote
Your system, with subtitles.
A self-hosted workspace that puts a live metric chart next to the paragraph explaining it, gives your internal APIs Stripe-style docs, and lets a change go through a draft, a diff and an approval. From the authors of ttlcache.
Why Oxynote?
The place Grafana gives you to explain a panel is its description field, a tooltip behind an info icon that Grafana's own docs tell you to keep short. Keep the explanation in Notion instead, and the chart can only appear there as an embedded Grafana panel, which renders only for someone already signed in to Grafana, and not at all on Grafana Cloud. Each tool keeps its own history, so nobody ever reviews the chart and its explanation as one change. In Oxynote the chart runs its own query inside the page, the explanation is whatever you type under it, and a draft branch carries both through one diff and one approval.
For a long time, the most reliable documentation at my company was the Slack chat I had with myself. How it got that way starts with dashboards. We had a lot of them: Grafana, Sentry, for some reason a bit of Datadog, and a few custom self-hosted HTML pages with charts on them. On top of that, I was encouraged to run my own health checks for the deployments I owned (why that could not live in Grafana or anything like it, nobody could tell me). Those deployments were services pulling financial market data over websockets. Under heavy volume they leaked memory and got OOM killed. There was a bug in there somewhere that we were chasing and could not find for a while, and in the meantime every kill meant missed events, and missed events meant running backfill scripts by hand. None of our dashboards showed any of that. So: cron, curl against each service's status endpoint, and the result posted to me privately on Slack. Not convenient at all.
Then there was everything else. Internal wikis still describing deployment procedures for trial products that had ended. Secret vaults. Server management commands and curl requests. None of it lived in one place, and access was its own problem: each of these had a different owner who could grant it, so a lot of my time went into finding out who that was and then finding them. Since we talked on Slack, that is where I asked for all of it, and that is where people answered, sometimes with plain credentials (the horror). To not lose any of it, I forwarded those messages to the chat with myself, which is how that chat became my source of truth for a long time: links to the specific Grafana dashboards that mattered out of the many we had, example curl requests against other teams' services so I could match their responses when integrating (neither the requests nor the responses were documented anywhere), and server IPs with notes on what was deployed where.
Naturally, I did try to fix it. I wrote Notion docs and linked the Grafana charts from them, and for a while that was fine. Then they drifted apart. One doc explained the labels on our ingestion-rate chart, market, region and so on, but new labels kept being added, nobody documented them, half were not even used in the chart, and each one cost Prometheus another time series. Keeping a doc and a chart in sync meant links on both sides, in Notion and in Grafana, which was more work than I wanted, plus switching browser tabs just to check that the explanation and the chart still meant the same thing. And that was only observability. Beyond it, admin actions were specific curl requests, and feature flags lived in a service disconnected from everything else. All of it deserved a proper review flow, like on GitHub, with diffs that work for text, metric charts and other visual structures. Instead it had none.
David (@davseby), who started Oxynote with me (@swithek), was the one who had to work through a system and its documents the first time he was on call, at a different company. He had years of Grafana and internal docs behind him and expected it to be routine. What he got was Datadog, which he had never used, and a wildly different Notion structure. Then, on that first shift, the services that enrich image metadata failed. Search over user uploads turned inaccurate, and from there it cascaded through the product. Monitors fired, but none of them linked anywhere or said which service had started failing, which made for a nerve-racking night of tying things together by hand. The metric showing one service overloaded and unresponsive existed the whole time. Datadog's UI is convoluted, though, and nothing explained what any chart tracked, so David never found it. An AI agent connected to Datadog's MCP server did.
What both of us wanted was the graph, the explanation, the command and the flag on one page, edited together, reviewed like code, and readable by a tired person at night or by an agent. Every tool we had was built to be great at one of those things and to never look sideways at the others. That gap is what Oxynote is for. It starts with the pieces we needed most: live Notion-like docs, metric charts, review flows, and Stripe-like split docs for real-time systems. The other pieces of the puzzle are coming.
Quick start
Oxynote is one container. This is all it takes:
docker run -d --name oxynote \
-p 8080:8080 \
-v oxynote_data:/oxynote/data \
ghcr.io/oxynote/oxynote:latest
Open http://localhost:8080 and log in with [email protected] and
oxynote-admin-1234.
To run from source, see CONTRIBUTING.md.
What is in the box
Metric grids
A Live Metrics block shows a time series, a bar chart or a gauge, built
from one or more Prometheus or SQL queries, with PostgreSQL, MySQL and
MariaDB supported on the SQL side. A metric grid is several of those blocks
side by side. In Grafana that would be a dashboard. In Oxynote it is a
dashboard inside a page, which means the explanation goes around it: what a
chart shows, why the threshold sits where it does, what to do when it is
crossed, all on the same page as the charts.
Reviews
Any page can be made reviewable, and from then on every change goes into a draft. The diff understands blocks, not just text: a renamed endpoint, a renamed response field and a reworded sentence show up in one view, red and green, in place. Reviewers approve, the draft merges into main, and main can be protected so nobody edits it directly.
Collaboration
Pages are edited live, so you see who is on the page, which block they are holding and where they are typing, and nobody overwrites anybody. Comments attach to a word, to a line in a diagram's source or to a whole chart, carry replies and get resolved when the change lands. Every mention and reply arrives in your inbox.
The rest
- Blocks: headings, lists, checklists, quotes, titled code blocks, callouts, images, files, Figma embeds, Mermaid diagrams.
- Freshness hooks: a block or page tracks the GitHub files, container image, web page or date it depends on, and its maintainers get a reminder when that changes.
- A page tree with sub pages, tags, full-text search, keyboard shortcuts for everything, light and dark themes.
- Workspaces with invitations, GitHub and Slack apps, and social login through GitHub, Google or Slack.
- Rubber Duck, the built-in assistant, edits pages and runs the same queries the blocks run, with the model of your choice: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, or a local one through Ollama. MCP clients such as Claude Code and Codex get the same tools over OAuth.
Simple on purpose
A few honest words about who this is for.
Oxynote is for you if:
- you explain systems to other tech people and want the metric chart and the explanation on one page
- you want Stripe-style docs for internal services without a doc generator
- you want changes to a page to go through a draft, a diff and an approval, like a pull request
- you want one page that your team and your agents both read
- you self-host
Probably not for you if:
- you want a hosted service. There is none for now
- you want a wiki for the whole company. This is for tech people and the systems they run
- you want every option under the sun. Oxynote is opinionated, ships good defaults and keeps the option count low
FAQ
Does it replace Grafana? That is the goal. Today it covers metric charts and dashboard-style grids from Prometheus and SQL, with the explanation written next to them. Logs and alerting are not there yet, but we are working on them.
Why the name? Internally we first called this "breathing docs". Breathing needs oxygen, so oxy became the prefix, and note followed.
Community
Join the Discord to ask questions, share how you use Oxynote and talk with the people building it. Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue.