Deploy and Host Monoscope on Railway

Monoscope is an open-source, production-grade observability platform designed for logs, metrics, and distributed traces with S3 and TimescaleDB backends. It provides full-text search, high-throughput OpenTelemetry ingestion, natural language telemetry querying, and automated anomaly detection agents.

This 1-click verified deployment template provisions Monoscope on Railway with zero manual configuration. The stack includes the Monoscope core engine, a dedicated TimescaleDB relational database container with persistent block storage, automatic cryptographic secret generation, and automated SSL edge routing.

About Hosting Monoscope

This deployment stack provisions an isolated multi-service architecture with automated health probes and dedicated persistent storage:

Observability Engine (monoscope): The primary Monoscope web dashboard, REST API, and gRPC ingestion server (ports 8080 HTTP and 4317 gRPC). Handles telemetry ingestion, TimeFusion analytics, and AI report generation.
Dedicated TimescaleDB Database (timescaledb): PostgreSQL powered by the TimescaleDB extension for hypertable time-series storage, log indexes, and metadata persistence.
Persistent Storage Volume: Attached dedicated block storage mounted at /var/lib/postgresql/data ensuring metrics, trace indexes, and configuration state persist across platform redeployments.

Why Deploy Monoscope on Railway?

1-Click Verified Setup: Instant multi-container deployment without managing Docker daemons, reverse proxies, or SSL certificates manually.
Dynamic Cryptographic Key Generation: High-entropy 32-character secrets are automatically generated during provisioning for database credentials, basic authentication, and API key encryption.
Inter-Service Credential Synchronization: DATABASE_URL dynamically references ${{timescaledb.POSTGRES_PASSWORD}} over Railway's encrypted private mesh network (timescaledb.railway.internal).
Persistent Relational Storage: Dedicated persistent volume attached to TimescaleDB to safeguard telemetry tables and application state.
Custom Domains & SSL: Built-in SSL encryption with custom domain routing and automatic edge certificates.
Reliable Scaling: Seamlessly scale RAM and vCPU compute resources as your ingestion workload expands.

Common Use Cases

Centralized Application Observability: Ingest, visualize, and query OpenTelemetry logs, metrics, and traces across microservices and cloud workloads.
Natural Language Telemetry Queries: Explore complex production error cascades and traces using natural language queries powered by AI agents.
Sovereign Telemetry Hosting: Maintain 100% control over sensitive application logs, audit trails, and compliance metrics without third-party vendor lock-in.

Dependencies for Monoscope Hosting

Container Workload (monoscope): The primary web user interface and REST/gRPC API ingestion service.
Container Workload (timescaledb): PostgreSQL 18 with TimescaleDB time-series extensions.
Persistent Storage Volume (timescale_data): Dedicated persistent volume attached to /var/lib/postgresql/data for database retention.

Configuration & Environment Variables

Variable	Default Value	Description
`DATABASE_URL`	(auto-wired)	PostgreSQL connection string connecting to TimescaleDB via Railway private networking with dynamic secret synchronization.
`POSTGRES_USER`	`postgres`	Administrative database user on the TimescaleDB instance.
`POSTGRES_PASSWORD`	(auto-generated)	32-character random cryptographic password generated per deployment.
`POSTGRES_DB`	`monoscope`	Initial database name for Monoscope application state.
`HOST_URL`	(auto-wired)	Public canonical URL assigned to the deployment (`https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}`).
`BASIC_AUTH_ENABLED`	`true`	Enforces HTTP Basic Authentication to protect your observability dashboard.
`BASIC_AUTH_USERNAME`	`admin`	Default administrative login username.
`BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD`	(auto-generated)	32-character high-entropy secret generated per deployment for dashboard login.
`API_KEY_ENCRYPTION_SECRET_KEY`	(auto-generated)	32-character cryptographic key used to encrypt ingested API keys and integration tokens.
`PORT`	`8080`	Internal HTTP listening port mapped automatically by Railway edge routing.
`GRPC_PORT`	`4317`	OpenTelemetry gRPC ingestion port for OTLP collectors and agents.
`MIGRATE_AND_INITIALIZE_ON_START`	`true`	Automatically executes database schema migrations on container boot.
`ENABLE_BACKGROUND_JOBS`	`true`	Enables scheduled anomaly detection, report generators, and maintenance workers.

First-Time Setup & Onboarding

Deploy the template on Railway.
In your Railway project dashboard, view the generated BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD under the monoscope service's Variables tab.
Open the public domain generated for your deployment (https://.up.railway.app).
Log in using admin and your generated BASIC_AUTH_PASSWORD.
Point your OpenTelemetry SDK or OTLP collector to your instance endpoint (HTTP: port 8080 or gRPC: port 4317) to begin streaming telemetry.

Verified and maintained by VerifiedStacks.