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Everyone starts the same way — an account, a key, a first record — and diverges immediately after. These journeys are the sequence for each common shape, including what to do on the second day rather than only the first hour.
In a hurry? The Quickstart gets telemetry on screen in ten minutes with nothing but curl. Come back here when you want to do it properly.

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Pick your path

SaaS customer

You use aiAxonIQ Cloud and run your services somewhere. The default path, and the one most teams want.

Docker

Containers on one or a few hosts, with Docker or Compose.

Kubernetes

A cluster, a DaemonSet, and the decisions that are painful to change later.

Developer

You are one engineer instrumenting one service, and want it working this afternoon.

Enterprise

Many teams, a security review, single sign-on and a rollout plan.

Self-hosted

What is and is not available today if you cannot use a hosted service.

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What every path shares

Whatever your shape, the same four things have to be true:
1

An account and an organization

Everything belongs to an organization. During the private beta you arrive by invitation — see Create your account.
2

A license key

The credential every ingest request carries, and what decides which organization data lands in. See Create a license key.
3

An endpoint

Shown on Get Started in the dashboard, which knows the right value for your deployment. See Ingest endpoints.
4

Something that exports

An OpenTelemetry SDK, a Collector, a Prometheus server, or the eBPF agent. None of them is aiAxonIQ-specific software.

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Two decisions worth making early

Both are cheap now and annoying later, on every path.
Set service.name on everything. Its default is unknown_service, and every service that omits it collapses into one entry that appears enormous and means nothing. The service map, per-service views and most alert rules all depend on it.
Decide how you separate environments before you send production traffic.A deployment.environment attribute keeps one set of keys, one place to look, and shared dashboards. A second organization gives you a real access boundary and nothing shared.Most teams want the attribute. The comparison is on Organizations and multi-tenancy.

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How long each takes

“Something useful” is the number that matters. First data is easy and proves very little. The gap between the two columns is where the actual work is: naming services, setting environments, and building the two or three views your team will really open.

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Next

Quickstart

Ten minutes, curl only, every hop proven.

How aiAxonIQ works

The path your data takes.

Installation overview

Collector or direct, and which platform guide to open.