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aiAxonIQ ingests OpenTelemetry logs, metrics and traces, plus Prometheus remote-write. You point an exporter at an endpoint, authenticate with a license key, and the data becomes queryable in the dashboard. This page describes the path your data actually takes. It is worth five minutes because two properties of that path — where your tenant is stamped, and which store answers which question — explain most of what you will run into later.

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The write path

Every signal follows the same five steps.
1

Your service exports over OTLP

An OpenTelemetry SDK or collector exports to the aiAxonIQ receiver.
2

The receiver authenticates and stamps

It validates your license key, applies rate limits, and stamps every record with your tenant ID.
3

Records are queued

Published to a durable log, partitioned by tenant.
4

A worker batches and writes

Records land in ClickHouse, the telemetry store. Logs are additionally indexed into OpenSearch for full-text search.
5

Rollups are maintained as data lands

Materialised views roll metrics up into one-minute and one-hour tables, so a query over a long window does not scan raw samples.
The receiver returns 202 Accepted as soon as the batch is queued. That is an acknowledgement of receipt, not of storage — a 202 means your data is in the pipeline, and it becomes queryable a short time later once the worker has flushed a batch.
Why your first data can take a moment to appear. Workers batch before writing, flushing when a batch fills or after a few seconds — whichever comes first. A single test span is in the small-batch case, so give it a few seconds before concluding something is wrong.

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Your tenant ID is assigned, never sent

The receiver derives your tenant from the license key on the request and stamps it onto every record. Nothing your SDK sends can set or change it. This matters in one practical way: there is no attribute you can add to route data into a different tenant. If you want to separate staging from production, separate them with a resource attribute such as deployment.environment and filter on it at query time, or use two accounts. Sending a tenant.id attribute does nothing.

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Which store answers which question

You do not query these directly — the dashboard and API do it for you — but knowing the split explains why some queries offer options others do not.

ClickHouse

Logs, spans and metric samples. Backs the Logs Explorer, traces, metrics and every dashboard chart. Supports field filters and boolean operators.

OpenSearch

A full-text index of your logs, per tenant, per day. Backs the fuzzy log-search API.

PostgreSQL

The control plane — your account, users, alert rules, dashboards and license-key metadata. No telemetry lives here.
The consequence worth remembering: log search and the Logs Explorer are backed by different engines with different query languages. The syntax documented in Searching logs is the Logs Explorer’s.

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What you need to send data

Three things, in order.
  1. A license key — created in the dashboard, sent as the X-License-Key header. See Create a license key.
  2. An endpoint — the receiver’s OTLP/HTTP address. See Send data with OpenTelemetry.
  3. An exporter — any OpenTelemetry SDK or the OpenTelemetry Collector. aiAxonIQ speaks standard OTLP, so there is no aiAxonIQ-specific SDK to install and nothing to rewrite if you later point the same exporter somewhere else.

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Placeholders used throughout these docs

Values marked above differ per deployment, which is why no single URL appears in these pages. Get Started in the dashboard renders the ones that are correct for yours.

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Next

Create a license key

The credential every ingest request carries.

Send data with OpenTelemetry

Endpoints, headers, and a first request.