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Bring Your Own Observability Backend

TraceLLM always stores sessions, spans, events, errors, token usage, and capture-policy results in the TraceLLM backend so users can inspect them in the TraceLLM dashboard.

Advanced teams can also forward a copy of project traces to their own OTLP HTTP backend, such as SigNoz, Honeycomb, Grafana Tempo, Datadog OTLP ingest, or a custom OpenTelemetry Collector.

When To Use External Exports

Use external exports when a team wants TraceLLM data inside its existing observability stack.

Common reasons:

  • correlate LLM calls with application traces
  • keep a customer-owned telemetry archive
  • build organization-specific dashboards
  • route traces through an internal OpenTelemetry Collector
  • use TraceLLM as the product UI while still feeding SigNoz or another backend

Default hosted TraceLLM users do not need this setup. They can use the TraceLLM UI directly.

Create A Destination

Open the TraceLLM dashboard and go to Exports.

Add:

  • Destination name: a human label, such as Production SigNoz
  • OTLP HTTP endpoint: the collector base URL
  • Headers: optional key=value lines for ingestion keys or auth headers
  • Enabled: whether new traces should be forwarded

TraceLLM sends trace payloads to:

<endpoint>/v1/traces

Example endpoint:

https://signoz.example.com:4318

If your provider gives a full /v1/traces URL, enter the base endpoint without /v1/traces.

Headers

Headers are entered one per line:

signoz-ingestion-key=your-key
x-honeycomb-team=your-key
authorization=Bearer your-token

After save, TraceLLM masks header values in API responses and the dashboard.

Test Trace

Use Test trace after creating a destination.

Expected result:

  • ok: the destination accepted a test OTLP trace
  • failed: the destination rejected the payload, timed out, or could not be reached

A failed export does not block TraceLLM ingestion. Your application traces still appear in the TraceLLM UI.

Provider Examples

SigNoz

https://signoz.example.com:4318

For SigNoz Cloud, use the OTLP ingest endpoint and add the ingestion key header provided by SigNoz.

Honeycomb

https://api.honeycomb.io

Add the Honeycomb team header:

x-honeycomb-team=your-api-key

Grafana Tempo Or OpenTelemetry Collector

https://otel-collector.example.com:4318

Route the collector to Tempo or any downstream backend.

Security Model

TraceLLM encrypts destination headers at rest and never returns raw saved header values from the API after creation or update.

External exports are project-scoped. A destination created in one project is not visible to another project.

Operational Notes

  • External exports are best-effort.
  • Export failures update destination status but do not fail SDK ingestion.
  • The TraceLLM database remains the source of truth for the product UI.
  • The platform-level SigNoz exporter can still run separately for TraceLLM's own internal observability.