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Quickstart

Five minutes from an empty workspace to live telemetry. You create an ingest key, point an OpenTelemetry exporter at the collector, and watch the signals land in Explore.

1. Create your workspace

Sign up at the console to get an organization. Everything in byteshift is scoped to that organization by your authenticated identity — never by a URL — so the only thing that decides which tenant a request touches is who you are.

2. Get an ingest key

Telemetry is authenticated with an ingest API key (an sk_… token). The fastest path is the guided setup for the otel-sdk source on the Integrations page — it mints a key and shows it once. You can also create one directly:

create an ingest keycurl -X POST https://api.byteshift.com/api-key \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <your session token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "name": "otel-exporter" }'

# → { "key": "sk_live_…" }   # shown once — store it in a secret manager
Store it now. The plaintext key is returned exactly once; byteshift keeps only a bcrypt hash. Rotate by issuing a new one and retiring the old.

3. Point your exporter at the collector

The collector speaks standard OTLP over HTTP — JSON and protobuf, on the verbatim OpenTelemetry paths /v1/logs, /v1/traces, and /v1/metrics. Any OTel SDK or the OpenTelemetry Collector can send to it. Set two environment variables and your app starts shipping:

environmentOTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://collect.byteshift.com
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=Authorization=Bearer sk_live_…
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=checkout-api

The collector validates the key against the control plane, then writes into Elasticsearch's native OTel data streams under your organization's namespace. The namespace comes from the key, so a payload can never write into another tenant.

4. See it in Explore

Open Explore in the console. Logs, traces, and metrics share one filter vocabulary — a time window plus service, severity/status, free-text q, and trace/span ids. Pick your service and the window; the signals you just sent are there.

Just connected and nothing yet? Ingest is buffered and flushed on a short interval, and a new source shows as awaiting data until the first document lands. Give it a few seconds, then widen the window.

Next

Learn the model behind the product in Core concepts, wire up a provider on the Integrations page, or hand the whole read surface to an agent with the MCP server.