Create and configure your first Observability service

Prerequisites

• You have a STACKIT customer account: Create a customer Account
• You have a STACKIT user account: Create a user account
• You have a STACKIT project: Create a project

Create your Observability service

In this Getting Started guide, you will create your first Observability service instance and configure it for use with Grafana.
You will do this in the STACKIT Portal.

1. Visit the STACKIT Portal .
2. On the sidebar, select Observability.
3. Click Create Observability.

After completing these steps, you will see the Create Observability overlay with several sections.

General information

• Enter a meaningful service name.

Plans

Under Plans, you can choose between different usage types and plan variants that define how your Observability service behaves:

• General purpose: the standard option for full observability and visualization.
• Metrics endpoint: optimized for collecting and storing metrics only, without a Grafana dashboard.

When you select General purpose, you will see multiple variants:

• Observability: includes the full managed stack with Prometheus, Thanos and Grafana.
• Monitoring: focused on metric collection and alerting.
• Frontend: mainly for accessing and visualizing dashboards.

For getting started, we recommend keeping the default plan General purpose → Observability → Observability-Starter-EU01.
You can always change your plan later in the Plans tab as your needs evolve.

Order your service

When all required information is set, click Order fee-based.
You will see a confirmation that your service has been created and added to your list of instances.

The service state changes from Creating to Active once the provisioning process is complete.

Performing the action described here may incur costs or change your ongoing costs. Please verify all one-time and/or recurring charges before ordering.

Configure your Observability service

Once your service is in the Active state, you can configure it via the Observability dashboard.

1. In the portal sidebar, select Observability.
2. Click the entry of the service you just created.
3. Select one of the available tabs to configure different settings.

Overview tab

• View and edit your instance name
• View the instance ID
• Define access control (ACL IP ranges)
• View the details of your plan

Change ACL to access your Observability service

Access to your Observability endpoints (Grafana, API, Prometheus, etc.) is protected by Access Control Lists (ACLs).
These define which IP ranges are allowed to communicate with your Observability instance.

By default, no external IP ranges are allowed. Only internal STACKIT communication.
If you want to connect to Grafana or send metrics from your local environment, you must explicitly add your client IP or network range.

1. Open your Observability service.
2. In the Overview tab, scroll down to the section Access control (ACL IP Ranges).
3. Click Edit.
4. Click Add IP Range.
5. Enter your IPv4 address or CIDR network range (for example 203.0.113.15/32 for a single IP).
6. Click Save.

You can find your current public IPv4 address using the Cloudflare Trace Tool .
Copy the value shown after ip=, append /32 and use it in the form.

If you forget to add your client IP to the ACL, you will not be able to access your Grafana instance,
nor will you be able to push or query metrics and traces through the APIs.

Once you save the ACL change, the configuration will take effect within a few seconds.
You can then access Grafana, the Thanos UI, or other Observability endpoints from your computer or monitoring systems.

Grafana tab

The Grafana tab provides you with access to your visualization interface.
Grafana allows you to view, explore and share dashboards based on your collected metrics.

Key features and options:

• Grafana link: Directly opens your managed Grafana instance in a new tab.
• Public read access: Toggle to make dashboards accessible without login.

  Useful for sharing non-sensitive dashboards publicly.

• Single sign-on (SSO): When enabled (default), all members of your STACKIT project can log in automatically using their STACKIT credentials.
• Grafana admin credentials: Here you can set initial credentials for the admin user.

After first login, change your Grafana admin password directly within Grafana for security reasons.

API tab

The API tab is the central hub for integrating external monitoring, logging and tracing tools.
It provides URLs and credentials specific to your Observability instance.

The section is structured into categories:

Logs (Push / Query)

Component	Description
Query	API endpoint to fetch and filter log data.
Push	Endpoint to send log data to your Observability instance (supports OpenTelemetry Logs).

Metrics and alerting (Prometheus / Thanos)

Component	Description
Thanos UI	Aggregated query interface for long-term metric storage. Ideal for exploring historical data.
Prometheus UI	Query interface for live metric data. Great for immediate inspection or debugging metrics.
Remote Write	Endpoint to send metrics from external Prometheus servers to your STACKIT Observability backend.
Alertmanager UI	Interface for managing alerting rules and notifications (email, webhook, etc.).

Traces (Distributed Tracing)

Component	Description
OpenTelemetry HTTP / gRPC	Endpoints for applications instrumented with OpenTelemetry SDKs to send trace data.
Zipkin	Compatible API for clients using the Zipkin trace model.
Jaeger HTTP (legacy)	Endpoint for older Jaeger clients that still send traces via the legacy protocol.
Jaeger UI	Web interface to explore and visualize individual traces. Perfect for debugging latency or dependencies.

All API endpoints are pre-configured for your instance — no manual URL editing is required.
You can copy the URLs and tokens from this tab to configure your Prometheus, Grafana Agent, or OpenTelemetry Collector.