Quick start #

Quick Start #

How to install #

VictoriaTraces is available in the following distributions:

Single-server-VictoriaTraces - all-in-one binary that is easy to run and maintain.

VictoriaMetrics is available as:

docker images at Docker Hub and Quay .
Binary releases
Source code . See How to build from sources

Starting VictoriaTraces Single Node via Docker #

Run the newest available VictoriaTraces release from Docker Hub or Quay :

      docker run --rm -it -p 10428:10428 -v ./victoria-traces-data:/victoria-traces-data \
  docker.io/victoriametrics/victoria-traces:latest
    

This command will make VictoriaTraces run in the foreground, and store the ingested data to the victoria-traces-data directory. You should see the following logs:

      2025-08-08T07:33:13.532Z	info	VictoriaTraces/app/victoria-traces/main.go:44	starting VictoriaTraces at "[:10428]"...
2025-08-08T07:33:13.532Z	info	VictoriaTraces/app/vtstorage/main.go:111	opening storage at -storageDataPath=victoria-traces-data
...
2025-08-08T07:33:13.542Z	info	VictoriaMetrics@v0.0.0-20250714222639-15242a70a79f/lib/httpserver/httpserver.go:145	started server at http://0.0.0.0:10428/
...
    

After VictoriaTraces is running, verify VMUI is working by going to http://<victoria-traces>:10428/vmui.

See how to write or read from VictoriaTraces.

Starting VictoriaTraces Single Node from a Binary #

Download the correct binary for your OS and architecture from GitHub . Here’s an example for Linux/amd64:

      curl -L -O https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaTraces/releases/download/v0.3.0/victoria-traces-linux-amd64-v0.3.0.tar.gz

Extract the archive by running:

      tar -xvf victoria-traces-linux-amd64-v0.3.0.tar.gz

Go to the binary’s folder and start VictoriaTraces:

      ./victoria-traces-prod

This command will make VictoriaTraces run in the foreground, and store the ingested data to the victoria-traces-data directory by default.

After VictoriaTraces is running, verify VMUI is working by going to http://<victoria-traces>:10428/vmui.

See how to write or read from VictoriaTraces.

Write data #

VictoriaTraces can accept trace spans via the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) . It provides the following API:

/insert/opentelemetry/v1/traces

To test the data ingestion, run the following command:

      echo '{"resourceSpans":[{"resource":{"attributes":[{"key":"service.name","value":{"stringValue":"frontend-web"}},{"key":"telemetry.sdk.language","value":{"stringValue":"webjs"}},{"key":"telemetry.sdk.name","value":{"stringValue":"opentelemetry"}},{"key":"telemetry.sdk.version","value":{"stringValue":"1.30.1"}},{"key":"process.runtime.name","value":{"stringValue":"browser"}},{"key":"process.runtime.description","value":{"stringValue":"Web Browser"}},{"key":"process.runtime.version","value":{"stringValue":"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/136.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"}}]},"scopeSpans":[{"scope":{"name":"@opentelemetry/instrumentation-document-load","version":"0.44.1"},"spans":[{"traceId":"1af5dd013a30efe7f2970032ab81958b","spanId":"229d083a6c480511","parentSpanId":"","name":"documentLoad","kind":1,"startTimeUnixNano":"ingestTimePlaceHolder","endTimeUnixNano":"ingestTimePlaceHolder","attributes":[{"key":"session.id","value":{"stringValue":"96e702c3-6f05-4f54-b2b3-2fad2b7b7995"}},{"key":"http.url","value":{"stringValue":"http://frontend-proxy:8080/cart"}},{"key":"http.user_agent","value":{"stringValue":"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) HeadlessChrome/136.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"}}],"events":[{"timeUnixNano":"1757320936519100098","name":"fetchStart"}],"status":{}}]}]}]}' | 
sed "s/ingestTimePlaceHolder/$(date +%s000000000)/g" | 
curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' --data-binary @- http://<victoria-traces>:10428/insert/opentelemetry/v1/traces
    

This command will send an HTTP request to VictoriaTraces and ingest one example span.

Alternatively, the following example application (HotROD) can be used:

      docker run \
  -p8080-8083:8080-8083 \
  --rm \
  --env OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT=http://<victoria-traces>:10428/insert/opentelemetry/v1/traces \
  jaegertracing/example-hotrod:latest \
  all
    

Note

Please make sure the host address in environment variable http://<victoria-traces> is accessible from the HotROD container. If you’re running VictoriaTraces locally (via docker or binary), the simplest way would be to fill the host IP of your machine, such as http://192.168.0.100, which you can get from the ifconfig/ipconfig output.

Simply open http://127.0.0.1:8080/, click any button to generate traces.

After that, you can check the data in VMUI at http://<victoria-traces>:10428/vmui.

See more details about how to send data to VictoriaTraces from an instrumented application or an OpenTelemetry collector in this doc .

Read data #

VictoriaTraces has built-in VMUI for browsing data by span at http://<victoria-traces>:10428/vmui.

VictoriaTraces also provides Jaeger Query Service JSON APIs . It allows users to visualize trace data on Grafana, by simply adding a Jaeger datasource with VictoriaTraces URL:

      http://<victoria-traces>:10428/select/jaeger

See more details about the HTTP APIs and params VictoriaTraces supports and how to query data from them in this doc .

Alerting #

see these docs .

Monitoring #

VictoriaTraces exposes internal metrics in Prometheus exposition format at http://<victoria-traces>:10428/metrics page. It is recommended to set up monitoring of these metrics via VictoriaMetrics (see these docs ), vmagent (see these docs ) or via Prometheus.

We recommend installing Grafana dashboard for VictoriaTraces single-node or cluster .

We recommend setting up alerts via vmalert or via Prometheus.

VictoriaTraces emits its own logs to stdout. It is recommended to investigate these logs during troubleshooting.

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