Bring Your Own Observability Backend

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.