Quickstart

Pulse is in an invite-only beta. You need an invite to an org; open the link in the email to create your account.

1. Create an ingest key

In the app, open Ingest keys (org owners and admins) and press Create. The key is shown once and starts with pulse_ik_. It belongs to the org, not to you, so it keeps working if you leave; revoke it there when you’re done with it.

2. Send data

With the OpenTelemetry Collector, add an otlphttp exporter and use it in your metrics and logs pipelines:

exporters:
  otlphttp/pulse:
    endpoint: https://pulse.nightroll.app
    compression: gzip
    headers: { Authorization: "Bearer ${env:PULSE_INGEST_KEY}" }
processors:
  batch: { send_batch_size: 8192, timeout: 10s }
service:
  pipelines:
    metrics: { receivers: [otlp], processors: [batch], exporters: [otlphttp/pulse] }
    logs:    { receivers: [otlp], processors: [batch], exporters: [otlphttp/pulse] }

Without a collector, set these environment variables for any OpenTelemetry SDK:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://pulse.nightroll.app
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=Bearer%20pulse_ik_..."
OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=none
OTEL_BLRP_SCHEDULE_DELAY=10000      # batch logs every 10 s; each request is billed as at least 128 KB

Pulse doesn’t take traces yet, so turn the trace exporter off (OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=none) or leave traces out of the collector pipeline.

3. Look at it

Open Explore in the app. Data shows up within seconds: pick Logs to search by service, severity and text, or Metrics to graph a metric by name. Live tail streams new rows as they arrive. See Explore and the query API.

4. Watch a cron job

Open Checks, create a heartbeat with your job’s schedule, and add the ping URL to the end of the job:

0 3 * * *  /usr/local/bin/backup.sh; curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 https://pulse.nightroll.app/p/<token>/$?

See Checks. To get alerted, add a Shift routing key under Alerts (Alerts and Shift).

5. Set up your bucket

On day 7 Pulse hands your data to your own bucket. Set one in Settings → Storage before then, or the data goes on a paid grace hold.

6. Connect your agent

Pulse has an MCP server, so Claude or any other agent can query your logs, create checks and set up monitors. See MCP and the QuickStart.

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