Create your first service

Prerequisites

• You have a STACKIT user account: Create a user account
• You have a STACKIT customer account: Create a customer 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 metrics only. It does not provide a Grafana dashboard and retains metrics for 5 minutes.

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

• Observability: includes the full managed stack for receiving logs, metrics, and traces, provides Grafana for visualization, and supports alerting.
• Monitoring: focused on metric collection and alerting.
• Frontend: mainly for accessing and visualizing dashboards in Grafana.

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

Optional: Restrict access to your Observability service

By default, your STACKIT Observability service is available on the Internet and accessible from anywhere without IP restrictions.

If you want to restrict access to your instance (including Grafana, Metrics, Logs, and Traces) to specific IPv4 addresses or network ranges, you can configure an Access Control List (ACL).

To learn how to set up and manage these IP filters, refer to our detailed guide: How to control access to your instance.

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

Feature	Description
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 view the initial credentials for the default admin user.

The default admin user is deprecated and will be removed on January 11, 2027, if the credentials have not been changed. Instead, we recommend using STACKIT SSO (enabled by default) or configuring a custom SSO provider. Additional information can be found in the Configure Grafana Access documentation or the corresponding Release Note.

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

Component	Description
Query	API endpoint to fetch and filter log data.
OTLP ingest	Endpoint to send log data using the OpenTelemetry protocol.
Ingest	Endpoint to send log data to your Observability instance (e.g., via Promtail/Loki).

Metrics and Alerting

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

Component	Description
OTLP ingest	Endpoint for applications instrumented with OpenTelemetry SDKs to send trace data via HTTP.
OTLP ingest gRPC	Endpoint for applications instrumented with OpenTelemetry SDKs to send trace data via gRPC.
Zipkin	Compatible API for clients using the Zipkin trace model.
Jaeger legacy	Endpoint for older Jaeger clients that still send traces via the legacy protocol.

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.