Your instrumentation uses access tokens to identify the project the tracer is reporting for. Microsatellites need this token to accept and store span data from the tracer. Reports from clients with invalid or deactivated access tokens will be rejected on ingress.

If you’re using a Developer Mode Satellite, the access token is developer.

Why have more than one access token

Access tokens tell the tracer which Lightstep Observability project to report to. You may want to create more than one token when you want fine-grained control over the data your services send to Lightstep Observability. For example, you can have separate tokens for your clients and backend services. This way, if you have key rotation policies for public services (i.e. web or mobile clients), you can disable only that one and deploy a new token without affecting the other clients’ reporting or having to roll out changes in multiple places.

Create an access token

You create access tokens for projects from the Project settings page. Access tokens allow the Microsatellites to report data to a specific Lightstep Observability project.

This image shows how to create an access token. The steps below describe the procedure in more detail.

  1. In Lightstep Observability’s navigation bar, click Projects and select your project.
  2. In the same navigation bar, click Project settings.

  3. In the Access tokens table, click Create new.

    Your new token appears at the top of the table. By default, tokens are unnamed.

  4. To name the token, click Rename, enter a name, and click Rename token.

It may take up to 5 minutes for the token to propagate to all active Microsatellites.

Disable/enable an access token

You can disable access tokens when needed. You can also reactivate disabled tokens.

This image shows how to disable an access token. The steps below describe the procedure in more detail.

  1. Go to the Project settings page.
  2. Under Access tokens, click Disable next to the relevant token.
  3. In the dialog, click Disable token.

This image shows how to reactivate a token. The steps below describe the procedure in more detail.

  1. On the Project settings page, toggle Show disabled.
  2. Click Enable next to the relevant token.
  3. In the dialog, click Enable token to reactivate the token.

It may take up to 5 minutes for the disable/enable signal to propagate to all active Microsatellites.