The collector is a standards-verbatim OTLP endpoint. If your stack already speaks OpenTelemetry, you point it at byteshift and change nothing else.

Endpoints

OTLP over HTTP, on the standard OpenTelemetry paths. Both JSON and protobuf are accepted, and gzip- or deflate-compressed bodies are inflated transparently.

Signal	Path	Content types
Logs	`POST /v1/logs`	application/json, application/x-protobuf
Traces	`POST /v1/traces`	application/json, application/x-protobuf
Metrics	`POST /v1/metrics`	application/json, application/x-protobuf

Authentication

Every request carries an ingest API key in the Authorization header. The collector validates it against the control plane (cached briefly) and derives your organization's namespace from it — any namespace in the payload is ignored, so a key can only ever write into its own tenant.

headerAuthorization: Bearer sk_live_…

Configure an OTel SDK

Nothing byteshift-specific: the standard OTLP exporter environment variables are all you set.

environmentOTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://collect.byteshift.com
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=Authorization=Bearer sk_live_…
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=checkout-api
OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES=deployment.environment=production

Send a log directly

For a quick smoke test without an SDK, post an OTLP/JSON log record:

curlcurl -X POST https://collect.byteshift.com/v1/logs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_…" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "resourceLogs": [{
      "resource": { "attributes": [
        { "key": "service.name", "value": { "stringValue": "checkout-api" } }
      ]},
      "scopeLogs": [{ "logRecords": [{
        "timeUnixNano": "1720900000000000000",
        "severityText": "ERROR",
        "body": { "stringValue": "payment gateway timeout after 3 retries" }
      }]}]
    }]
  }'

Enrichment at ingest

Ingest is deterministic and never destructive. A JSON string body is lifted to structured fields; an absentseverity is filled from a parsed level field or inferred from the body — but a severity you already set is never overwritten, and a line that can't be parsed is kept verbatim.

Back-pressure

Writes are buffered and flushed on a short interval with exporter-style retry. If the buffer is full you get a 503 with a Retry-After header — back off and resend. An undecodable payload gets a 400, per OTLP. Well-behaved exporters handle both automatically.

Push, not just pull

Some sources push to byteshift instead of being polled: Vercel log and trace drains deliver straight to the collector, and Claude Code and Cowork can stream their events to an OTLP endpoint you configure. See Integrations for the provider-specific setup.

Sending telemetry