Reference

OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

Export traces with OpenTelemetry, scrape Prometheus metrics, and read the logs of a deployed Worker.

Each Durable Object runs as a Rivet Actor, so Rivet’s traces, metrics, and logs cover your objects. You turn them on with environment variables, and your code does not change.

Inside orange serve, your Worker calls your Durable Objects, which run as Rivet Actors. RivetKit sends their traces over OTLP to a collector such as Jaeger, Tempo, or Honeycomb, and Prometheus scrapes the runner's metrics endpoint.

Quickstart

You need a Rivet Cloud cluster and an OTLP collector, such as Jaeger, Tempo, or Honeycomb.

Send traces to your collector

orange deploy \
  --var OTEL_SERVICE_NAME:my-app \
  --var OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT:https://collector.example.com/v1/traces

Find an object's spans

Each request and RPC call to a Durable Object is one span. Its rivet.actor.key is the object’s ID.
Open metrics and logs

On Rivet Cloud these need no setup. The Rivet dashboard shows your cluster’s metrics, and its Logs page shows your Worker’s output.

Try it locally

orange dev reads the same variables from your shell.

export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=my-app
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT=https://collector.example.com/v1/traces
orange dev

Self-host

Pass the same variables to the container. Set RIVETKIT_METRICS_PORT to serve Prometheus metrics, and scrape them from a sidecar in the same pod.

docker run \
  -e OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=my-app \
  -e OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT=https://collector.example.com/v1/traces \
  -e RIVETKIT_METRICS_PORT=9464 \
  -e RIVET_ENDPOINT=... my-worker

Learn more

OpenTelemetry: span names, sampling, and application spans
Performance monitoring: PromQL for actors and SQLite
Logging: log levels and formats

AI context Spans, metrics, and log output in detail

Written for LLMs and coding agents: every edge case, measurement, and known deviation. You do not need it to use the feature.

Traces

With an OTLP endpoint set, RivetKit exports a span for each Durable Object request and RPC call, with the SQLite work inside it. The Worker’s own handlers get no spans.
Each span carries rivet.actor.name, which is the class in kebab case and a short hash, such as greeter-5c8cd02c, and rivet.actor.key, which is the object’s ID.
--var also puts the variable in the Worker’s env. See Variables and secrets.
If the collector needs an API key in OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS, pass it with --secrets-file, not --var.

Metrics

RivetKit serves Prometheus metrics at http://127.0.0.1:$RIVETKIT_METRICS_PORT/metrics.

Rivet Cloud sets RIVETKIT_METRICS_PORT on each runner, collects the metrics, and shows them in the Rivet dashboard. orange deploy refuses to set it with --var.
Self-hosted: the endpoint listens on 127.0.0.1 only, so docker run -p does not expose it. Scrape it from the same network namespace, such as a sidecar in the same Kubernetes pod.
orange dev serves no metrics.
With several Workers, only the first Worker’s runtime serves metrics, so they cover that Worker’s objects only.

Metric	What it shows
`rivet_rivetkit_actor_active_count`	Awake actors, by `actor_name`
`rivet_rivetkit_actor_http_requests_active`	Requests and RPC calls in progress
`rivet_rivetkit_actor_inbox_depth`	Work waiting to run

Logs

orange dev prints each request and your Worker’s console output.
orange serve prints the console output and RivetKit’s warnings and errors.
Self-hosted, read the container’s output.
Set RIVET_LOG_LEVEL=info to add RivetKit’s info logs.