Observability

Metrics and tracing are configured under a single observability section. Both are independently enableable. This page covers only the enabling/toggle configuration - for available metrics, Grafana panels, and error-kind labels see Metrics; for span structure, attributes, and sampling see Tracing.

gateway:
  observability:
    metrics:
      enabled: true
      exporter: prometheus
      otlp:
        endpoint: otel-collector:4318
        insecure: true
        interval: 10s
    tracing:
      enabled: true
      exporter: otlp
      sampling_ratio: 1.0
      otlp:
        endpoint: otel-collector:4318
        insecure: true
        interval: 10s

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
`metrics.enabled`	bool	false	`false`	Enable metrics instrumentation
`metrics.exporter`	string	if enabled	-	`prometheus` or `otlp`
`metrics.otlp.endpoint`	string	if otlp	-	OTLP HTTP endpoint (e.g. `otel-collector:4318`)
`metrics.otlp.insecure`	bool	false	`false`	Disable TLS for the OTLP connection
`metrics.otlp.interval`	duration	false	`60s`	Push interval for OTLP metrics
`tracing.enabled`	bool	false	`false`	Enable trace export
`tracing.exporter`	string	if enabled	-	`otlp` (only OTLP is supported)
`tracing.sampling_ratio`	float	false	`1.0`	Fraction of traces to sample, between `0` and `1`
`tracing.otlp.endpoint`	string	if enabled	-	OTLP HTTP endpoint for trace export
`tracing.otlp.insecure`	bool	false	`false`	Disable TLS for the OTLP connection
`tracing.otlp.interval`	duration	false	`60s`	Batch span export interval

Metrics: with exporter: prometheus, the /metrics endpoint is served on the admin port, not the data port. This means Prometheus does not need a client certificate even when the data port enforces mTLS. With exporter: otlp, no endpoint is exposed - metrics are pushed on the configured interval. See the Metrics page for available metrics and Grafana setup.

Trace propagation: Aastro installs the standard W3C Trace Context propagator unconditionally - even when tracing.enabled: false. Incoming traceparent headers are extracted and propagated to upstreams regardless of whether Aastro itself exports spans. This preserves distributed tracing context across deployments that haven't enabled the OTLP exporter yet.

tip

sampling_ratio: 1.0 exports every trace, which is fine for low-traffic services and indispensable during debugging, but expensive at scale. For high-RPS production deployments consider 0.01 to 0.1 (1-10% sampling). Span data volume scales linearly with this value.