Not every incident starts at a laptop with a browser open. hx brings golden signals, alerts, and HelixQL queries into a terminal.

A surprising number of our design partners' on-call engineers start incident response over SSH — already logged into a bastion host, already in a terminal, before they'd ever get to a browser. We kept hearing "I just want to run a query without alt-tabbing," so we built a proper terminal client instead of telling people to open a browser tab.

What hx actually does

hx is a single Go binary that authenticates with your existing Helix API key and gives you a live, scrollable terminal UI: an alerts pane, a golden-signals pane per service, and a query prompt that runs real HelixQL against your workspace.

$ hx query 'from traces | where route == "/checkout" | summarize p95(duration) by bin(5m)'

bin                  p95(duration)
2026-04-23T14:00:00Z  210ms
2026-04-23T14:05:00Z  890ms  *
2026-04-23T14:10:00Z  920ms  *
2026-04-23T14:15:00Z  240ms

Built for a bad connection, not a demo

hx renders over plain SSH with no WebSocket dependency, refreshes on a configurable interval instead of holding an open stream, and caches the last successful query result locally so a flaky connection during an incident doesn't leave you staring at a blank screen. None of that would matter in a product demo. All of it matters at 3am on a hotel wifi network.

What it doesn't try to be

hx deliberately doesn't replicate the full web UI — no dashboard editing, no admin settings. It's scoped to the read-and-query workflow of active incident response, because trying to cram dashboard authoring into a terminal UI would make both worse.

Why we open-sourced the client

hx's source is public, partly because we wanted teams comfortable auditing a binary they're piping their API key through during an incident, and partly because the terminal-UI ecosystem has better ideas about keybindings and layout than we do alone. Two of the pane layouts shipping in the next release came directly from community pull requests, including a compact mode built by a contributor who runs it on a phone-tethered laptop during on-call weeks with no reliable wifi.

  • Single-binary terminal client, authenticates with your existing API key
  • Live alerts and golden-signals panes, plus a real HelixQL prompt
  • Works over plain SSH, no WebSocket dependency
  • Scoped to incident response, not a full dashboard replacement