Core concepts
Oculis uses a small vocabulary. Knowing these five terms makes the rest of the product, and the rest of this documentation, read the way it is meant to.
Collector ─observes─► System ─hosts─► Agent ─produces─► RunCollector
Section titled “Collector”The component you install on infrastructure running AI workloads. It observes the host it is installed on and reports outbound to Oculis.
A Collector runs out-of-band. It is not in your application’s model request path, so if it stops, you lose visibility rather than availability.
See Oculis Collector.
System
Section titled “System”A host a Collector reports on — a server, a VM, or a workstation. Systems carry the host-level picture: operating system, hardware, and resource usage over time.
You will find them under Collectors → Systems.
An AI workload Oculis has discovered. An agent is the unit you attribute activity and cost to, and the thing you open when you want to know what a workload has been doing.
Agents appear under AI Agents → Agent Inventory.
AI-capable application
Section titled “AI-capable application”An application that uses an AI API but is not necessarily an agent. Oculis lists these separately from agents, so that discovering a broad set of applications does not distort your agent count.
They appear in their own section on the Agent Inventory page.
A single execution of an agent — one unit of work, with the model calls, tokens, cost, and outcome that belong to it.
Runs are what you search under Investigate → Explore, and what the cost and usage views aggregate. When you are answering “what did this thing actually do, and what did it cost”, you are looking at runs.