What is Lightarch?
Lightarch is a cloud-native observability platform built entirely on Cloudflare's edge infrastructure. It collects, stores, and queries your application's traces, logs, and metrics — with your data stored in your own R2 bucket and Iceberg table, not a shared cloud database.
It costs 70–90% less than Datadog or New Relic because there are no egress fees: your data never leaves Cloudflare's network.
Screenshot needed
Architecture diagram: App → OTLP → Cloudflare edge ingest → D1 (hot, 48h) + R2 Iceberg (cold, unlimited) → Dashboard. Show data flow with arrows.
Key concepts
DSN — Data Source Name
Your DSN (la_live_...) is a secret token that identifies your tenant when sending data to the ingest gateway. Keep it in environment variables, never commit it. You can rotate it in Settings.
Signals
Lightarch ingests three OpenTelemetry signal types:
| Signal | Endpoint | What it captures |
|---|---|---|
| Traces | /v1/traces | Distributed request spans — timing, service hops, errors |
| Logs | /v1/logs | Log records with body text, severity, attributes |
| Metrics | /v1/metrics | Gauges, counters, histograms (p50/p99 computed at ingest) |
Hot vs Cold storage
Spans and logs live in a per-tenant D1 database (SQLite at the edge) for 48 hours — fast, instantly queryable. After 48 hours they roll off D1 and land in R2 + Iceberg (your own bucket) for unlimited cold storage, still queryable via fetch or the cold path in the UI.
Architecture
Lightarch is built entirely on Cloudflare Workers, running on Cloudflare's edge network rather than a fleet of origin servers in a handful of data centers. We chose this foundation deliberately:
| Why Cloudflare Workers | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| No cold starts, no servers to scale | Ingest and queries run at the edge, close to wherever your app is deployed — consistently low latency with no capacity planning on our end |
| D1 (SQLite at the edge) | Your hot data (last 48h) is instantly queryable with no connection pooling or database ops overhead |
| R2 with zero egress fees | Cold storage lives in your own R2 bucket as an Iceberg table — this is the entire reason Lightarch costs 70–90% less than Datadog or New Relic |
| Durable Objects | Powers real-time features like live log tail and support chat with strongly-consistent, low-latency state — no separate WebSocket infrastructure to run |
Behind the scenes this is a set of purpose-built services coordinating ingest, queries, billing, and alerting — but that's an implementation detail you shouldn't need to think about. What matters is that every piece runs on the same edge network your requests already hit, so there's no origin round-trip anywhere in the pipeline.
Roles & Access
| Role | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Owner | Full access — billing, delete account, all team management |
| Admin | Settings, alerts, invite members, rotate DSN — no billing/delete |
| Member | All data access, raw SQL queries, create dashboards and alert rules |
| Viewer | Read-only — logs, traces, metrics, alerts view. No SQL, no settings |