OpenTelemetry

Already using OpenTelemetry? Two env vars and you’re done:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://logs.yoursite.com/otel
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=Authorization=Bearer lgn-your-api-key

LogNorth speaks OTLP over HTTP with protobuf (http/protobuf), the default protocol of the OTel specification. It does not accept OTLP/JSON or gRPC: an exporter that sends JSON by default, such as @opentelemetry/exporter-logs-otlp-http in Node, needs the protobuf exporter instead, or OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf where the SDK reads it. Gzip bodies work.

We accept everything your app sends. We keep the logs. Traces and metrics are accepted and discarded. LogNorth does logs and errors, that’s it.

What We Keep

From each log record, we extract what matters:

OTel field	LogNorth field	Notes
body	message	Records without a text body are skipped
timeUnixNano	timestamp	Falls back to observedTimeUnixNano
attributes	context	Flattened key-value map
resource.attributes	context	Merged (log attributes win on conflict)
severityNumber	is_error	ERROR and FATAL severity → error
traceId	trace_id	Hex-encoded, all-zeros stripped
exception.message	context.error	OTel semantic convention
exception.type	context.error_class	Groups errors into issues

Error Detection

A log record becomes an error if any of these are true:

• Severity is ERROR or FATAL
• exception.message or error.message attribute exists
• exception.type or error.type attribute exists

Same rules as the native ingestion API.

What We Discard

• Traces (/v1/traces): accepted, discarded
• Metrics (/v1/metrics): accepted, discarded
• Span IDs, flags, dropped attribute counts: not used
• Resource attributes like service.name: stored in context, not used for routing