Project: Opstrace (Observability and Analysis / Observability)
File: concepts.md

description: Fundamental user-facing concepts An "instance" of Opstrace runs inside your cloud account. It is installed with the CLI `opstrace create` command. This name must be globally unique and limited to 23 characters (`[a-z0-9-]`) because it used to provide a convenient DNS name: `<instancename>.opstrace.io`. Once chosen, an instance name cannot be changed. A "tenant" is a unit of isolation. allow for logical separation of concerns, while otherwise sharing the same underlying system. An Opstrace instance supports multiple tenants. The tenant primitive is extended from the underlying projectsCortex and Loki. Tenants isolate data, dashboards, and API endpoints. For example, you can use tenants to achieve separation by team (e.g., `team-revenue` vs. `team-fraud`) or environment (e.g., `prod`, `staging`, `dev`). Sometimes this isolation is used to address security concerns, but more generally, it helps keep things well-organized: because, after all, separation of concerns is a valuable best practice to keep in mind. Opstrace comes with a default "system tenant" which ingests internal system logs and metrics. The system tenant is useful for the administrator to monitor the overall health of Opstrace, across tenants. It cannot be deleted. During creation at least one "user tenant" must be specified. Additional user tenants can be added to a running Opstrace instance (see our Guide). The data API encompasses HTTP API endpoints meant for pushing data into and querying from an Opstrace instance. That is, if you consider an Opstrace instance as a black box, the data API is how you get your payload data into the instance, and how you can look it up again. The most prominent use case for the data API is for external systems to push logs \(via e.g. FluentD or Promtail\) or metrics \(via Prometheus' remote\_write protocol\) into an Opstrace instance. An external system that desires to integrate with the data API needs to present authentication proof, a "data API token". Upon Opstrace creation, one such API token file is generated per tenant. These tokens are long-lived and need to be managed carefully by the administrator. A data API token is a long-lived JSON Web Token \(JWT\) signed with an RSA private key. It gets issued by the Opstrace CLI as part of the `create` operation. A data API token contains a set of standard JWT claims as well as an Opstrace instance-specific claim set. To authenticate an HTTP request towards the data API, the API token must be presented within an `Authorization` header using the `Bearer` scheme: ```text Authorization: Bearer <token> ``` At the time of writing, the private key for token creation is generated upon instance creation time within the Opstrace CLI. It never enters the Opstrace instance itself and is in fact persisted nowhere. The corresponding public key, though, is passed into the Opstrace instance and is then subsequently used within the data API authenticator to cryptographically validate each putative authentication token presented within incoming HTTP requests. Given these details, you can think of the API tokens as long-lived client certificates -- it's just that instead X.509 the system uses JWT as the meta data container format. Note that this concept does not allow for secure, immediate, individual API token revocation: the most predictable \(and secure\) way to invalidate API tokens in this model is to invalidate all of them at the same time by using a fresh public key for token verification.