About Public Satellites

This topic is about our Classic Satellites. If you installed Satellites after 4/06/2021, you are probably running Microsatellites.

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

Note the following:

• All span data is sent to Public Satellites, 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 Satellite if you need to remove PII.

• You can’t control the Satellite recall on public Satellites. It depends on the rate and size of incoming spans, which means they may not store enough of your data to generate complete traces 100% of the time.

• Public Satellites 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.
• Lightstep offers no SLA or guarantee regarding uptime or availability.

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.