Overview

The default way to run jaque is the boring one, and that’s deliberate: one binary, no external services, doing everything itself.

-target all is the default

jaque -config jaque.cue

With no -target flag, jaque runs as all — the engine schedules checks and executes them itself, in the same process. Event log, coordination store, and (if you want them) perfdata sinks and the archive all default to embedded, in-process implementations: the event log defaults to -eventlog memory (in-memory, no durability) and can be pointed at a local Pebble-backed store instead with -eventlog file://...; coordination defaults to in-memory too, with -coordination nats://... as the shared alternative. No CGo anywhere, no separate service to stand up first.

When you don’t need anything more

If your estate fits on one host’s execution capacity — checks running from one machine is enough, and one process losing its in-memory state on restart is an acceptable cost (or you’ve turned on -eventlog file://.../-retain for durability) — -target all is the whole deployment story. There is no operational tax for staying here: no cluster to run, no external NATS to keep alive, no coordination store to provision.

When to look further

Split roles when you need one of these, and only then:

• Checks from more than one network or machine — a worker in a DMZ, a worker with local plugins that can’t run centrally. See Topologies’s engine/worker split.
• A read-only surface separate from execution — a dashboard reachable without exposing the process that schedules checks. See -target ui in Topologies.
• Perfdata or notification delivery that needs to scale independently of check execution. See -target sink / -target notifier.
• High availability for the engine itself — more than one engine sharing ownership of the object set, with automatic failover. See Cluster and coordination.

Every one of those is additive on top of the single-binary default, not a different product — the same binary, a different -target, and (for anything beyond all) an external -eventlog nats://... and -coordination nats://... that every role points at.