Getting started

Quickstart

Point your OpenTelemetry collector at Inkvo, wait for one baseline window, and the next time something breaks you'll get a narrative instead of a wall of graphs. Most teams are connected in an afternoon.

Before you start

You'll need an Inkvo workspace and at least one service already emitting OpenTelemetry traces or metrics. If you don't emit OTel yet, the Connect OpenTelemetry guide covers instrumentation first.

No new agents

Inkvo ingests the OTLP you already produce. There are no sidecars, daemonsets, or proprietary agents to roll out.

1 · Create an ingest key

Each environment gets its own key. In the app, go to Settings → API Keys and create one scoped to ingest:*. You'll see it once — store it in your secret manager.

terminalbash

# store the key your environment will send with
export INKVO_KEY="ik_prod_b4f2e9c1a7d3…"

2 · Point your collector at Inkvo

Add Inkvo as an OTLP exporter. If you already export to another backend, add Inkvo alongside it — we read, we don't replace.

otel-collector-config.yamlyaml

exporters:
  otlphttp/inkvo:
    endpoint: https://ingest.inkvo.dev
    headers:
      authorization: "${INKVO_KEY}"

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      exporters: [otlphttp/inkvo]
    metrics:
      exporters: [otlphttp/inkvo]

3 · Verify ingest

Within a minute the workspace dashboard shows your first service. The status strip turns green and you'll see live span and metric counts climbing.

Give it a baseline window

Detection stays quiet for the first 24 hours while Inkvo learns what normal looks like per service. You won't get useful narratives before then — that's expected.

What happens next

After the baseline window, Inkvo watches for deviations and correlates them with deploys, infra changes, and downstream signals. When something crosses the line, you get a narrative incident in Slack, email, or your pager — tuned to the environment's tone.