About Public Satellites

Lightstep offers a public shared Satellite pool that can help save time during development and testing. Not having to install and maintain an on-premise Satellite pool speeds up the initial production of meaningful traces right away. Once you get into production, consider sending traffic to on-premise Satellites, as they offer better performance and isolation from other organizations.

Note the following:

• Because the public Satellites are meant for development only, Lightstep offers no SLA or guarantee regarding uptime or availability.
• Public Satellites cannot be scrubbed for personally identifiable information (PII). Lightstep is not responsible for any PII sent to these Satellites.
• You can’t control the Satellite recall on public Satellites. They have a fixed recall, which means they may not store enough of your data to generate complete traces 100% of the time.
• Public Satellites are rate-limited. Only a certain number are allocated to each project and your project may require more Satellites for 100% coverage.
• Because public Satellites are remote, you may experience network latency.

Encrypted Connections with TLS

Lightstep uses TLS certificates signed by the certificate authority Let’s Encrypt. To establish a secure (TLS) connection to Lightstep’s public Satellite 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 Lightstep Public Satellite Pool

In general, Lightstep OpenTelemetry Launchers and OpenTracing tracer clients are pre-configured to connect to the public satellite 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.