VictoriaTraces Distributed Tracing

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Store and Query Distributed Traces in Your Own VPC

VictoriaTraces is an OpenTelemetry compatible distributed tracing database from the VictoriaMetrics family. It accepts spans over standard OTLP HTTP and serves them back through Jaeger compatible query APIs plus a built in browser UI, from a single static Go binary with no external storage dependency. There is no Cassandra, no Elasticsearch and no object store to operate: span storage, indexing and query all live in one process on one instance.

This image delivers VictoriaTraces fully installed as a systemd service, fronted by an authenticating nginx reverse proxy, with span storage on a dedicated EBS volume.

## Who This Is For

Platform and SRE teams who want span storage inside their own VPC rather than a third party SaaS, without running a Jaeger plus Elasticsearch cluster to do it. Application teams instrumenting with the OpenTelemetry SDKs who need an OTLP endpoint to point at on day one. Observability owners replacing a multi node tracing backend with a single instance appliance.

## Application Stack

• VictoriaTraces 0.9.4 single static Go binary, run by a dedicated non login system account
• nginx reverse proxy on port 80, the only public listener, enforcing HTTP Basic Auth
• OTLP HTTP span ingestion at /insert/opentelemetry/v1/traces (protobuf or JSON)
• Jaeger compatible query APIs under /select/jaeger/api/ and the built in span explorer UI at /select/vmui/
• Span storage on a dedicated 32 GiB EBS volume, independently resizable and separate from the OS disk

## Secure By Default

VictoriaTraces, like every component in the VictoriaMetrics family, ships with no authentication of its own. For a tracing backend that matters twice over: an open ingest endpoint lets anyone poison the trace store, and an open query endpoint leaks every span in it, including hostnames, URLs, user identifiers and internal topology. This image therefore never gives the database a public listener.

• VictoriaTraces binds to loopback 127.0.0.1 only and is reachable solely through nginx
• Both the ingest path and the query paths sit behind the same HTTP Basic Auth gate
• A unique 24 character password is generated on first boot, bcrypt hashed into the nginx credential file and written to a root only file
• The image ships with an empty credential file, so no usable password exists in it and every login against the unbooted image is rejected
• The only unauthenticated route is a static health endpoint that never touches the database

## Getting Started

1. Launch the AMI, opening port 80 in your security group alongside SSH

2. SSH in and read the generated password: sudo cat /root/victoriatraces-credentials.txt

3. Open http:///select/vmui/ and sign in as admin to explore stored traces

4. Point an OpenTelemetry Collector or an instrumented application at http:///insert/opentelemetry/v1/traces using the same credentials

5. Query traces programmatically through the Jaeger compatible APIs under /select/jaeger/api/

6. Verify the appliance end to end at any time: sudo /usr/local/sbin/victoriatraces-selftest.sh

## Retention and Sizing

Span retention defaults to 7 days, and storage is capped at 80 percent of the data volume so a span burst cannot fill the disk and wedge the service. Both are single flag settings the user guide explains how to change. Trace volume is far higher than log volume, so size the volume against your span rate, not your log rate.

## Project Maturity

VictoriaTraces is a newer component of the VictoriaMetrics family, first released in July 2025 and under active development. It is pre general availability by the project's own statement: upstream has not yet committed to backward compatibility for the on disk data format, so a future major upgrade may require re ingesting spans rather than an in place upgrade. We state this plainly because it is the one thing worth knowing before you standardise on it. The software itself is Apache 2.0 licensed and installed unmodified from the official upstream release.

## 24/7 cloudimg Support

Every deployment is backed by cloudimg engineers available around the clock via email. Support covers:

• Initial deployment and instance sizing guidance
• OpenTelemetry Collector and SDK configuration against the OTLP endpoint
• Retention, disk sizing and storage tuning
• TLS termination with Let's Encrypt or custom certificates
• nginx reverse proxy and authentication configuration
• VictoriaTraces version upgrades
• Troubleshooting ingestion, query and connectivity issues

VictoriaTraces and VictoriaMetrics are trademarks of their respective owners. cloudimg is not affiliated with or endorsed by VictoriaMetrics. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.