Alloy structures your data around a few key concepts. Understanding these will help you get the most out of the platform.

---

Missions

A mission is a single data collection session — one flight, one survey run, one field test. When you upload log files to Alloy, they become a mission.

What goes in

Every mission starts with your raw inputs:

• Data files — sensor logs, telemetry recordings, camera feeds, and other data from your autonomous system (MCAP, ROS bags, CSV, etc.)
• Metadata — attributes that describe the session and device: software version, firmware ID, serial number, test configuration, operator, and any custom fields specific to your setup
• Description / field notes — your context about what happened: goals, conditions, observations. Alloy's AI uses this to generate a more relevant report.

What comes out

Alloy processes these inputs and packages them into a single mission record containing:

• AI-generated report — a narrative summary with key events, anomaly detection, and findings
• Key metrics — distance, duration, and domain-specific measurements extracted from your data
• Visualizations — timeseries plots, maps, 3D trajectory views, and image galleries
• Searchable instances — every data point within the mission is indexed and searchable across your entire library
• Structured metadata — auto-extracted and user-provided attributes that power filtering and comparison

How it connects

Missions are the top-level unit of organization. Everything in Alloy connects back to missions:

• Search lets you find missions, reports, scenarios, and chats from anywhere in the platform — and Alloy AI can search across instances within missions
• Reports analyze one or many missions
• Scenarios scan across your mission library for patterns

---

Instances

An instance is a single moment in time of a robot's operation — think of it as a one- to few-second slice of what the robot was seeing, doing, and logging. It captures everything happening at that moment: the camera frames, the sensor readings, the log messages, the position, the state of the system.

A single mission might contain thousands of instances. Where a mission tells you what happened overall, instances let you zoom in on what was happening right then. They're the atomic unit of your data — the smallest piece you can search for, inspect, and reason about.

This is what makes Alloy's search powerful. When you ask "find all moments where the robot detected an obstacle" or "show me instances with GPS signal loss," you're searching across every instance from your entire history of missions.

The fastest way to find instances is through Search — open it with Ctrl+K, type what you're looking for, and press Enter to ask Alloy AI. Describe what you want in natural language, log patterns, or image descriptions, and AI searches across your entire mission library.

---

Reports

Alloy generates two kinds of reports, and they serve very different purposes.

Mission summaries

Every mission you upload automatically gets a mission summary — a report tied to that single session. It's generated during ingestion with no input from you, and it answers the question: what happened during this mission?

Mission summaries include a narrative overview, key events, metrics, visualizations, and anomaly highlights. They're scoped to one mission and one moment in time. Think of them as the automatic debrief.

Custom reports

Custom reports are what you create through Alloy AI. They're fundamentally different from mission summaries because they can span any scope you need:

• Longitudinal analysis — compare performance across 50 missions over the last month
• Cross-version comparison — "compare software v2 with v1 across my last 2 sprints"
• Cross-device comparison — how does robot A perform vs. robot B on the same route?
• Deep dives — focus on a single metric or event type across your entire history
• Trend analysis — track how battery degradation progresses over weeks of operation
• Targeted investigation — "show me every mission where the IMU readings were anomalous"

You create them through conversation — describe what you want, and Alloy AI searches your data, runs analysis, and assembles the results. You can iterate until the report says exactly what you need.

Custom reports can contain narrative analysis, interactive charts, maps, metrics, timelines, and downloadable data files. They live on the Reports page and are shareable by URL with your team.

Recurring reports

Set up a report prompt on a schedule — daily, weekly, or fortnightly — and Alloy generates it automatically. Useful for fleet performance summaries, anomaly digests, or any analysis you want refreshed regularly.

---

Scenarios

A scenario is a pattern scanner. You describe a pattern in plain language — through the chat — and Alloy continuously scans your mission library to find matches.

The prompt you provide is enriched by Alloy AI during the conversation. You might start with something simple like "find GPS issues" and the chat helps you refine it into a precise detection definition before the scanner starts running.

Examples:

• "Find all instances where battery voltage dropped below 11V during flight"
• "Flag any mission where the vehicle exceeded a 30-degree roll angle"

Scenarios run in the background — they scan existing missions and automatically check new ones as they're uploaded. Each scenario tracks its status, matches, and progress.

---

Alloy AI

Alloy AI is the conversational interface available throughout the platform. Use it to:

• Ask questions about your mission data
• Search for specific events or patterns
• Create and refine custom reports
• Set up scenarios
• Run analysis with SQL and Python
• Generate charts, maps, metrics, and timelines

Alloy AI has full context on your uploaded data, so you can ask natural-language questions and get answers grounded in your actual mission logs.