> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.aiaxoniq.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Frequently asked questions

> Short answers to the questions that come up most — data, cost, access, instrumentation and the things aiAxonIQ deliberately does not do.

Short answers with a link to the long one. If you are debugging something right
now, [Troubleshooting](/support/troubleshooting) is the faster page.

## Getting data in

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Do I need to install an aiAxonIQ agent or SDK?" icon="box">
    No. There is no aiAxonIQ agent and no aiAxonIQ SDK. You use the upstream
    OpenTelemetry tooling for your language or platform with two settings
    changed — which also means nothing here locks you in. See
    [Installation overview](/send-data/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Collector or direct from my application?" icon="server">
    A Collector, in almost every case. It gathers host and container telemetry
    your SDK cannot see, holds the credential in one place instead of in every
    service, batches so you stay inside the rate limit, and gives you one place
    to filter and redact.

    Direct export is reasonable for a single service or a local experiment.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can I keep my existing Prometheus?" icon="chart-line">
    Yes, in both directions. Remote-write pushes its metrics to aiAxonIQ with a
    config change on one side, and a Prometheus-compatible query API lets
    Grafana read aiAxonIQ back. See
    [Prometheus remote-write](/send-data/prometheus) and
    [Grafana](/guides/integrations/grafana).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What if I cannot change a service's code?" icon="lock">
    eBPF instrumentation observes it from the kernel — no code change, no
    restart. It is early access; see
    [Zero-code instrumentation](/zero-code/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="HTTP or gRPC?" icon="tower-broadcast">
    HTTP unless you have a reason not to. It survives proxies and
    TLS-terminating load balancers that gRPC does not, and you can reproduce
    any failure with one `curl`. See
    [Exporters](/send-data/otel/exporters#otlp-over-http-or-grpc).
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## My data is missing

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="I got 202 Accepted but I cannot find it" icon="clock">
    `202` means accepted, not stored. A batching consumer flushes at 50,000
    rows or five seconds — on a quiet account you are waiting out the five
    seconds.

    Then, in order of how often each is the answer: the **time range** (narrow
    to 15 minutes), a **hardcoded timestamp** copied from an example, or the
    **wrong organization**. See
    [Verify your data arrived](/get-started/verify-data).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Everything shows as unknown_service" icon="tag">
    `service.name` is not set, and its default is `unknown_service`. Every
    service that omits it collapses into one entry. Set `OTEL_SERVICE_NAME` —
    see [Resource attributes](/send-data/otel/resource-attributes).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="It is on 15 minutes but not on 24 hours" icon="chart-area">
    A fresh record is in the raw table before the rollups covering it are
    complete. Wait a minute; do not widen the range. See
    [Data retention](/concepts/retention).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="My trace has a hole in the middle" icon="share-nodes">
    Either context propagation broke — the missing service appears as its own
    root trace — or sampling is inconsistent, and it disappears entirely. See
    [Traces with a hole in them](/guides/traces/overview#traces-with-a-hole-in-them).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Clicking logs for a span shows nothing" icon="file-lines">
    The logger is not trace-aware. A `print()` or a bare file logger produces
    correct, searchable lines that are permanently disconnected from every
    trace. Use your language's OpenTelemetry logging bridge.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Retention and cost

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="How long is data kept?" icon="calendar-days">
    Logs, traces and full-resolution metrics for **30 days**. Minute-resolution
    metric rollups for 90 days, hour-resolution for **365 days**. See
    [Data retention](/concepts/retention).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What happens if I exceed my plan?" icon="gauge">
    **Volume allowances do not stop your ingest.** Telemetry keeps arriving and
    stays queryable; overage is handled commercially. Which also means you will
    not be warned by a failure — watch **Settings → Usage**.

    Seats are the exception and are enforced. See
    [Plan limits](/concepts/limits).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="How do I reduce my bill?" icon="filter">
    In order of return: drop health-check and metrics-scrape traffic at the
    Collector, tail sample traces, raise log levels in noisy services, and
    check no metric label carries a user or request id. The first usually beats
    all the others combined.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can I delete data I sent by mistake?" icon="trash">
    There is no self-service per-record delete. Contact support for a
    credential committed to a log or a mistaken import.

    The durable fix is redaction at the Collector, before it leaves your
    network — see
    [Collector configuration](/send-data/otel/collector-config).
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Access and organizations

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Can I restrict someone to certain services?" icon="user-lock">
    No. Every member of an organization sees all of its telemetry. Roles
    control what you can *do*, not what you can see.

    If some telemetry must be invisible to some people, the boundary you need
    is a separate organization. See
    [Organizations and multi-tenancy](/concepts/organizations).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="How do I separate staging from production?" icon="layer-group">
    A `deployment.environment` resource attribute, in one organization, is what
    most teams want. Two organizations is the answer only when the requirement
    is access control.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Does SSO create accounts automatically?" icon="fingerprint">
    **No.** Your identity provider asserts identity only. A user with no
    existing membership is refused `403`, however well their authentication
    worked. Invite first, then have them sign in. See
    [Single sign-on](/get-started/sso).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can aiAxonIQ staff see my data?" icon="user-shield">
    Support can be granted time-limited access to investigate a ticket, and
    every such session is recorded in **your** audit log — who, when and for
    how long. See [Audit log](/guides/audit).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="I cannot create a license key" icon="key">
    Key creation requires **Admin**. Ask your organization's Owner or an Admin.
    See [Roles and permissions](/concepts/roles).
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Alerting

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="My alert rule never fires" icon="bell-slash">
    Most often an unimplemented comparator. Only `GT`, `LT` and `EQ` exist — a
    rule saved with `GTE`, `LTE` or `NE` is created without complaint and never
    fires, with no error anywhere.

    Second most often: an **anomaly** or **synthetic** rule created as an
    ordinary rule. Those are fired by different components, not by the
    evaluation loop.

    **Use Test after saving any rule.** See [Alerting](/guides/alerts/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="How quickly will I be alerted?" icon="stopwatch">
    Rules evaluate on a fixed 60-second loop, which is the floor on detection
    latency. Setting a shorter evaluation window does not make it check more
    often.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Why is my webhook channel refused?" icon="link-slash">
    Generic outbound webhooks are disabled by default, pending request signing
    and protection against server-side request forgery. Slack, PagerDuty,
    Teams, OpsGenie and email all work. Your operator can enable it.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## About the product

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Am I locked in?" icon="unlock">
    Not by design, and it is testable. Everything speaks standard OTLP — point
    the same exporter at a different backend and it works. You can even export
    to both during an evaluation. See
    [Exporters](/send-data/otel/exporters#multiple-destinations).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can I self-host aiAxonIQ?" icon="server">
    Self-hosted deployments exist and are arranged with your account contact.
    There is no public download or self-service installer today, and the
    operational material ships with the deployment rather than being published
    here. See [Onboarding: self-hosted](/onboarding/self-hosted).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="How do I get an account?" icon="user-plus">
    During the private beta, by invitation. See
    [Create your account](/get-started/accounts).
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Next

<CardGroup cols={3}>
  <Card title="Troubleshooting" icon="triangle-exclamation" href="/support/troubleshooting">
    The pipeline stage by stage.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Glossary" icon="book" href="/support/glossary">
    Terms used throughout, defined once.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Choose an onboarding path" icon="map" href="/onboarding/overview">
    Six end-to-end journeys.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>