I wanted to check something regarding LiveKit observability and data residency. If I enable Livekit Observability but keep recording disabled, will data residency still be followed when I geofence the setup to India?
Specifically, I want to understand whether any observability-related data, metadata, logs, metrics, or traces would remain within India under the geofencing/data residency configuration, Could you please clarify how this works? If this won’t hold true can someone suggest an alternative that can be implemented with minimal effort to get a tracing capability?
I’m not quite clear on the distinction between ‘enable LiveKit Observability’ and ‘keep recording disabled’. These two terms are synonymous, but you can choose which parts of the recording get enabled (link)
However, if you have India data residency requirements, you should disable LiveKit Observability entirely since, at the time of writing, observability is hosted in the US.
The workaround is to register in your agent SDK to receive metrics events:
These will be sent even if observability is disabled.
Thanks for clarifying. I’ve now gone through the data hooks page, which helped a lot.
What I was trying to distinguish: I assumed “recording” (audio/video storage) and “observability” (traces, metrics, session logs) were separate data planes that could be enabled independently with different residency configurations. I now understand they’re both part of the same LiveKit Cloud Insights system and both US-hosted.
So to confirm: with India data residency requirements, we need to disable LiveKit Cloud Observability entirely and collect everything ourselves via data hooks.
For the alternative — the OpenTelemetry integration in the data hooks docs looks like exactly what we need. We can use set_tracer_provider to export the same spans to a self-hosted OTEL collector running in our India region.
A couple of follow-up questions:
Cost — does disabling LiveKit Cloud Observability and using data hooks instead avoid the $0.01/min observability charge entirely? The pricing calculator suggests yes, but wanted to confirm.
OTEL backend: is there a recommended self-hosted stack for ingesting the spans? We’re looking at Datadog with an India region setup. Any known gotchas with the LiveKit OTEL exporter and Datadog?
Cost — does disabling LiveKit Cloud Observability and using data hooks instead avoid the $0.01/min observability charge entirely? The pricing calculator suggests yes, but wanted to confirm.
OTEL backend: is there a recommended self-hosted stack for ingesting the spans? We’re looking at Datadog with an India region setup. Any known gotchas with the LiveKit OTEL exporter and Datadog?
Nothing is specifically recommended. I’ll be honest, my personal experience with this doesn’t go beyond testing out that code sample in the docs with Langfuse.