About public Microsatellites

Cloud Observability offers a public shared Microsatellite pool for lower throughput production environments or development environments. Not having to install and maintain an On-premise Microsatellite pool speeds up the initial production of meaningful traces right away. As your traffic increases, consider running On-premise Microsatellites, as they can be tuned to suit your application’s higher traffic load.

Note the following:

  • All span data is sent to Public Microsatellites, including possible personally identifiable information (PII). Even though the data is sent over an encrypted connection, this may or may not meet your organization’s security requirements. We recommend running On-premise Microsatellite if you need to remove PII.
  • Public Microsatellites are rate-limited. Community tier customer are rate limited to 4 MB per minute, and we recommend that Enterprise customers send less than 600 MB per minute.
  • Cloud Observability offers no SLA or guarantee regarding uptime or availability.

Encrypted connections with TLS

Cloud Observability uses TLS certificates signed by the certificate authority Let’s Encrypt. To establish a secure (TLS) connection to Cloud Observability’s public Microsatellite pool, any machine that runs a tracer must have a root certificate installed. Most operating systems come with one of both certificate(s) pre-installed. If not, you can add them manually by downloading one from here.

Connecting to Cloud Observability Public Microsatellite pool

In general, Cloud Observability OpenTelemetry Launchers and OpenTracing tracer clients are pre-configured to connect to the public Microsatellite pool by default, with no custom settings.

If needed, please refer to each language-specific tracer client for information about the configuration options it supports. You can customize these, using the following protocols. All use secure TLS (ingest.lightstep.com:443) endpoints.

Protocol Format
HTTP JSON
HTTP Thrift
HTTP Proto
gRPC Proto

See also

Microsatellite configuration parameters

Learn about Microsatellites

Updated Mar 1, 2021