Deploy OpenLIT OTLP Observability Stack

Deploy and Host OpenLIT on Railway

OpenLIT is the open source, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform for LLM apps and AI agents. Send traces, metrics and logs from any OpenTelemetry SDK or the OpenLIT SDKs, then explore requests, token usage, cost, latency, exceptions and GPU metrics. OpenLIT also ships a prompt hub, a secrets vault, an LLM playground (Openground), evaluations and realtime rules.

About Hosting OpenLIT

This template is secure by default: the upstream default login (user@openlit.io / openlituser) is replaced by a generated password, self sign-up is blocked at the gateway (OpenLIT has no setting for that), and OTLP writes require an OpenLIT API key. It boots without any LLM provider key.

First steps after deploy:

1. Open the OpenLIT Gateway URL and log in as user@openlit.io with the OPENLIT_ADMIN_PASSWORD variable of the OpenLIT service.
2. Create an API key in Settings, API Keys.
3. Point your app at the gateway: OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https:// and OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=Authorization=Bearer , or openlit.init(otlp_endpoint=..., otlp_headers=...).
4. Apps in the same Railway project can send to http://openlit.railway.internal:4318 instead.

Common Use Cases

• Trace LLM calls and agent runs with token usage, cost and latency
• Collect OpenTelemetry traces, metrics and logs from apps running anywhere
• Manage prompts and secrets centrally and compare models in Openground

Dependencies for OpenLIT Hosting

• OpenLIT Gateway (Caddy): the only public service. Serves the UI and the OTLP/HTTP endpoints /v1/traces, /v1/metrics, /v1/logs.
• OpenLIT: UI and API, the first-party OTLP receiver (HTTP 4318, gRPC 4317) and the realtime engine. Users, API keys and settings live in SQLite on its volume.
• ClickHouse 26.3 LTS: stores all telemetry, with a generated password.
• NATS 2.14 JetStream: carries realtime signals between the receiver and the rule engine, with generated passwords.

Deployment Dependencies

• OpenLIT: https://github.com/openlit/openlit
• ClickHouse: https://clickhouse.com
• NATS: https://nats.io
• Caddy: https://caddyserver.com

Key Variables

• OPENLIT_ADMIN_PASSWORD (OpenLIT): admin password, applied on every boot. Change it here, not in the UI.
• ALLOW_SIGNUP (OpenLIT Gateway): set to true only while invited teammates register.
• OTLP_REQUIRE_API_KEY (OpenLIT): true, keeps the public OTLP endpoint closed to anonymous writes.
• NEXTAUTH_URL (OpenLIT): update when you add a custom domain.
• Optional OAuth: GITHUB_CLIENT_ID/SECRET, GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID/SECRET. These let any account of that provider sign in.

Recommended plan: Hobby or higher (four services, ClickHouse plus a Next.js app).

Why Deploy OpenLIT on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying OpenLIT on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.