Getting started

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Watchtower is an observability platform: traces, logs, metrics, errors, browser RUM and replay, uptime checks, alerting and on-call, release tracking and an API for all of it. Everything speaks OpenTelemetry (OTLP over gRPC and HTTP) first.

Five steps

  1. Create keys. In the Console create a project and an environment, then an ingest key (wti_) for your services and, for a web app, a publishable key (wtp_) bound to your site's origin. For CI create a service account with a ci:write key. Which key takes which scope is in Keys and scopes.

  2. Instrument the backend. Node.js, Go, Python, Java, .NET, Rust, or any OTLP exporter (curl test).

  3. Instrument the browser. Browser SDK and the Next.js guide.

  4. Mark releases. Post a release and one deployment per service from CI (deployments from CI).

  5. Watch it. Add an uptime monitor, set alert receivers (channels) and trim volume with shaping rules.

Install

Piece

Install

Node SDK

npm install @watchtowerobservability/node@latest (0.7.0 at the time of writing)

Browser SDK

npm install @watchtowerobservability/browser@latest (0.4.0)

wtctl

release binary, see wtctl (0.3.1)

Host agent

see agent (wt-agent 0.1.8; the Helm chart needs helm registry login ghcr.io for now)

Terraform provider

not on the Terraform Registry yet; build from source, see as code

Privacy and secrets in URLs, limits, API ids, RUM routes, SLOs, on-call, migration from Datadog or Grafana.

Updated