The Helm chart installs OpenTelemetry Operator in Kubernetes cluster. The OpenTelemetry Operator is an implementation of a Kubernetes Operator. At this point, it has OpenTelemetry Collector as the only managed component.
- Kubernetes 1.24+ is required for OpenTelemetry Operator installation
- Helm 3.9+
In Kubernetes, in order for the API server to communicate with the webhook component, the webhook requires a TLS certificate that the API server is configured to trust. There are a few different ways you can use to generate/configure the required TLS certificate.
- The easiest and default method is to install the cert-manager and set
admissionWebhooks.certManager.createtotrue. In this way, cert-manager will generate a self-signed certificate. See cert-manager installation for more details. - You can provide your own Issuer by configuring the
admissionWebhooks.certManager.issuerRefvalue. You will need to specify thekind(Issuer or ClusterIssuer) and thename. Note that this method also requires the installation of cert-manager. - You can use an automatically generated self-signed certificate by setting
admissionWebhooks.certManager.enabledtofalseandadmissionWebhooks.autoGenerateCerttotrue. Helm will create a self-signd cert and a secret for you. - You can use your own generated self-signed certificate by setting both
admissionWebhooks.certManager.enabledandadmissionWebhooks.autoGenerateCerttofalse. You should provide the necessary values toadmissionWebhooks.cert_file,admissionWebhooks.key_file, andadmissionWebhooks.ca_file. - You can sideload custom webhooks and certificate by disabling
.Values.admissionWebhooks.createandadmissionWebhooks.certManager.enabledwhile setting your custom cert secret name inadmissionWebhooks.secretName - You can disable webhooks alltogether by disabling
.Values.admissionWebhooks.createand setting env var toENABLE_WEBHOOKS: "false"
$ helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
$ helm repo updateSee helm repo for command documentation.
$ helm install \
opentelemetry-operator open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operatorIf you created a custom namespace, like in the TLS Certificate Requirement section above, you will need to specify the namespace with the --namespace helm option:
$ helm install --namespace opentelemetry-operator-system \
opentelemetry-operator open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operatorSee helm install for command documentation.
The following command uninstalls the chart whose release name is my-opentelemetry-operator.
$ helm uninstall opentelemetry-operatorSee helm uninstall for command documentation.
This will remove all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.
The OpenTelemetry Collector CRD created by this chart won't be removed by default and should be manually deleted:
$ kubectl delete crd opentelemetrycollectors.opentelemetry.io$ helm upgrade my-opentelemetry-operator open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operatorPlease note that by default, the chart will be upgraded to the latest version. If you want to upgrade to a specific version,
use --version flag.
With Helm v3.0, CRDs created by this chart are not updated by default and should be manually updated. Consult also the Helm Documentation on CRDs.
See helm upgrade for command documentation.
The following command will show all the configurable options with detailed comments.
$ helm show values open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operatorSee OpenTelemetry website for more details about the Collector
Once the opentelemetry-operator deployment is ready, you can deploy OpenTelemetry Collector in our Kubernetes cluster.
The Collector can be deployed as one of four modes: Deployment, DaemonSet, StatefulSet and Sidecar. The default mode is Deployment. We will introduce the benefits and use cases of each mode as well as giving an example for each.
If you want to get more control of the OpenTelemetry Collector and create a standalone application, Deployment would be your choice. With Deployment, you can relatively easily scale up the Collector to monitor more targets, roll back to an early version if anything unexpected happens, pause the Collector, etc. In general, you can manage your Collector instance just as an application.
The following example configuration deploys the Collector as Deployment resource. The receiver is Jaeger receiver and the exporter is logging exporter.
$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: opentelemetry.io/v1alpha1
kind: OpenTelemetryCollector
metadata:
name: my-collector
spec:
mode: deployment # This configuration is omittable.
config: |
receivers:
jaeger:
protocols:
grpc:
processors:
exporters:
logging:
service:
pipelines:
traces:
receivers: [jaeger]
processors: []
exporters: [logging]
EOFDaemonSet should satisfy your needs if you want the Collector run as an agent in your Kubernetes nodes. In this case, every Kubernetes node will have its own Collector copy which would monitor the pods in it.
The following example configuration deploys the Collector as DaemonSet resource. The receiver is Jaeger receiver and the exporter is logging exporter.
$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: opentelemetry.io/v1alpha1
kind: OpenTelemetryCollector
metadata:
name: my-collector
spec:
mode: daemonset
config: |
receivers:
jaeger:
protocols:
grpc:
processors:
exporters:
logging:
loglevel: debug
service:
pipelines:
traces:
receivers: [jaeger]
processors: []
exporters: [logging]
EOFThere are basically three main advantages to deploy the Collector as the StatefulSet:
- Predictable names of the Collector instance will be expected
If you use above two approaches to deploy the Collector, the pod name of your Collector instance will be unique (its name plus random sequence). However, each Pod in a StatefulSet derives its hostname from the name of the StatefulSet and the ordinal of the Pod (my-col-0, my-col-1, my-col-2, etc.). - Rescheduling will be arranged when a Collector replica fails
If a Collector pod fails in the StatefulSet, Kubernetes will attempt to reschedule a new pod with the same name to the same node. Kubernetes will also attempt to attach the same sticky identity (e.g., volumes) to the new pod.
The following example configuration deploys the Collector as StatefulSet resource with three replicas. The receiver is Jaeger receiver and the exporter is logging exporter.
$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: opentelemetry.io/v1alpha1
kind: OpenTelemetryCollector
metadata:
name: my-collector
spec:
mode: statefulset
replicas: 3
config: |
receivers:
jaeger:
protocols:
grpc:
processors:
exporters:
logging:
service:
pipelines:
traces:
receivers: [jaeger]
processors: []
exporters: [logging]
EOFThe biggest advantage of the sidecar mode is that it allows people to offload their telemetry data as fast and reliable as possible from their applications. This Collector instance will work on the container level and no new pod will be created, which is perfect to keep your Kubernetes cluster clean and easily to be managed. Moreover, you can also use the sidecar mode when you want to use a different collect/export strategy, which just suits this application.
Once a Sidecar instance exists in a given namespace, you can have your deployments from that namespace to get a sidecar
by either adding the annotation sidecar.opentelemetry.io/inject: true to the pod spec of your application, or to the namespace.
See the OpenTelemetry Operator github repository for more detailed information.
$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: opentelemetry.io/v1alpha1
kind: OpenTelemetryCollector
metadata:
name: sidecar-for-my-app
spec:
mode: sidecar
config: |
receivers:
jaeger:
protocols:
thrift_compact:
processors:
exporters:
logging:
service:
pipelines:
traces:
receivers: [jaeger]
processors: []
exporters: [logging]
EOF
$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: myapp
annotations:
sidecar.opentelemetry.io/inject: "true"
spec:
containers:
- name: myapp
image: jaegertracing/vertx-create-span:operator-e2e-tests
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
protocol: TCP
EOF