Send APM traces
You can send spans and traces to Splunk Observability Cloud using the trace ingest API endpoints. This is useful, for example, when you must bypass or can't use the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector, or when instrumenting an application for which there is no official instrumentation available.
The following instructions show how to use the API to send traces to APM. For the API reference, see Send APM Traces.
When you send an API request, you need to use the endpoint specific to your organization's realm. To learn more, see Realms in endpoints.
Requirements
- Have an organization token to use the API. For more information, see Authentication Tokens.
- Know which realm your organization is in. For more information, see Realms in endpoints.
Spans formats
You can send spans and traces in the following formats:
| Format | Content-Type | Endpoint |
|---|---|---|
| Zipkin JSON1 and JSON2 | application/json | https://ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v2/trace/signalfxv1 |
| Jaeger | application/x-thrift | https://ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v2/trace/jaegerthrift |
| Splunk APM Protocol (SAPM) | application/x-protobuf | https://ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v2/trace/sapm |
| OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) | application/x-protobuf | https://ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v2/trace/otlp |
Use the API to send traces
To learn how to send traces, see the POST /v2/trace and the POST /v2/trace/otlp reference topics in Splunk Observability Cloud API reference.
Send traces over gRPC
The gRPC ingest endpoint for traces is ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com:443, where <realm> is your Splunk Observability Cloud realm. Requests must contain an access token in the X-SF-Token header.
To obtain an access token, see Organization access tokens.
To find the realm name of your account, follow these steps:
- Open the navigation menu in Splunk Observability Cloud.
- Select Settings.
- Select your username.
The realm name appears in the Organizations section.