Deploy and Host Pitot with Railway

Pitot is single-binary observability your agents can operate. Send OpenTelemetry traces, logs and metrics to one service, store them as Parquet you own, and investigate them with Pitot's built-in agent or your own agent over MCP.

About Hosting Pitot

This template runs the official labstack/pitot image as one Railway service with a persistent volume at /var/lib/pitot/data. That volume holds telemetry Parquet, rebuildable DuckDB query state and the SQLite control database (users, dashboards, alerts). The template generates the sign-in secret and a first ingest token, sets PITOT_PUBLIC_URL to the service's Railway domain so MCP works out of the box, and checks /healthz on every deploy.

After the first deploy:

Open the service's Deploy Logs and find the PITOT SETUP block. Replace http://127.0.0.1:7520 in its URL with your Railway domain (https://.up.railway.app) and open it within one hour to create the administrator.
Copy PITOT_INGEST_TOKEN from the service's Variables tab. Setup does not display it again because the template already set it.
Point an OpenTelemetry exporter at the service:
```
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="authorization=Bearer%20"
```
Services in the same Railway project can skip the public internet and use http://pitot.railway.internal:7520, which also carries OTLP/gRPC.
Connect your own agent over MCP: claude mcp add --transport http pitot https:///mcp.

To enable the built-in agent, set PITOT_AI_PROVIDER to anthropic or openai and add ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or OPENAI_API_KEY.

Pitot has no passwords. Sessions end after 12 hours idle or 7 days total; for later sign-ins, set PITOT_SMTP_HOST, PITOT_SMTP_USERNAME, PITOT_SMTP_PASSWORD and PITOT_SMTP_FROM to receive email codes.

Common Use Cases

Self-hosted OpenTelemetry backend for traces, logs and metrics from services on Railway or anywhere else
Letting Claude Code, Codex or any remote MCP client query telemetry, inspect traces and build dashboards
Asking the built-in agent what broke, and getting answers backed by trace, log and metric evidence
Alerting on service error rate, latency, throughput and log volume via webhooks or email

Dependencies for Pitot Hosting

A Railway volume (included) for the Pitot data directory
Optional: an Anthropic or OpenAI API key for the built-in agent
Optional: SMTP credentials for email sign-in codes and alert emails

Deployment Dependencies

Pitot documentation: https://pitot.dev
Source code (Apache-2.0): https://github.com/labstack/pitot
Configuration reference: https://pitot.dev/docs/reference/configuration
Connecting an agent over MCP: https://pitot.dev/docs/guides/mcp

Implementation Details

Variable	Value	Purpose
`PITOT_AUTH_CODE_SECRET`	generated, 64 hex chars	Signs sign-in codes and login links
`PITOT_INGEST_TOKEN`	generated, `foi_` + 43 hex chars	First ingest token for OTLP exporters
`PITOT_PUBLIC_URL`	`https://${{RAILWAY_PUBLIC_DOMAIN}}`	Browser origin and MCP audience
`PITOT_RETENTION_DAYS`	`30`	Telemetry retention; lower it on small volumes
`RAILWAY_RUN_UID`	`0`	Lets the non-root image write the Railway volume

Pitot is a single node and Railway volumes cannot be shared between replicas, so keep this service at one replica. Hobby volumes start at 5 GB; resize the volume or lower PITOT_RETENTION_DAYS as ingest grows. The image tag is pinned to a tested release; read the release notes and back up the volume before changing it, because storage migrations only run forward.

Why Deploy Pitot 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 Pitot 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.