Perform the following tasks to get started with Observe.

How data gets into Observe

flowchart LR
  subgraph Sources
    A1[App Services - APM]
    A2[LLM Apps]
    A3[SaaS and Cloud Integrations]
    A4[Raw Data Sources]
  end

  subgraph With Observe Agent
    AG1[Observe Agent]
  end

  subgraph No Observe Agent
    direction TB
    NA1[OpenTelemetry Collector]
    NA3[Managed Integrations]
    NA4[Batch and Streaming: files S3 Kafka]
  end

  subgraph Observe
    O1[Ingest Endpoint]
  end

  A1 -->|OTel SDK or auto instrumentation| NA1
  A2 -->|OTel LLM signals| NA1
  A3 -->|Connector configs| NA3
  A4 -->|Files Streams APIs| NA4
  A4 -->|Direct HTTP| O1

  NA1 --> O1
  NA3 --> O1
  NA4 --> O1

  A1 -.->|send via agent| AG1
  A2 -.->|send via agent| AG1
  A3 -.->|collect via agent| AG1
  A4 -.->|collect via agent| AG1
  AG1 -.-> O1

Get data into Observe using the Observe Agent

The Observe Agent runs on your hosts and in your architecture to collect logs, metrics, traces, and events and sends them to Observe. The Observe Agent is built on the OpenTelemetry (OTel) collector.

Some workflows, such as the ones using the Add Data portal, include in-product instructions for creating an ingest token and installing the Observe Agent. You can follow the instructions in the documentation, or in the product, but you only need to do it once.

Get data into Observe without the Observe Agent

In cases where you may not be able to install the Observe Agent, or if you already have an OTel collector configured and want to send your data directly to Observe, you can use the following options:

Troubleshoot your data ingestion

You may encounter errors when ingesting data into Observe. Use the System Datastream to help diagnose issues with incoming data. This Datastream contains many different types of observations about activity in your Workspace.