Deploy Otel Collector

Deploy an OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector provides a vendor-agnostic solution for receiving, processing and exporting telemetry data. We won’t cover the collector in depth here but I encourage you to review the documentation on the collector to learn more about the features and capabilities it provides. For the purposes of this guide, the collector is used to receive the telemetry data from Istio, batch the data and export it to Cloud Observability.

  1. Create a new filed name otel-collector.yaml
  2. Add the following ConfigMap to the file.
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: opentelemetry-collector-conf
  namespace: istio-system
  labels:
    app: opentelemetry-collector
data:
  opentelemetry-collector-config: |
    receivers:
      otlp:
        protocols:
          grpc:
          http:
    processors:
      batch:
    exporters:
      otlp/lightstep:
        endpoint: ingest.lightstep.com:443
        headers:
          "lightstep-access-token": "<YOUR_TOKEN>"
      logging:
        loglevel: debug
    extensions:
      health_check:
    service:
      extensions:
      - health_check
      pipelines:
        logs:
          receivers: [otlp]
          processors: [batch]
          exporters: [logging]
        traces:
          receivers: [otlp]
          processors: [batch]
          exporters: [logging, otlp/lightstep]
        metrics:
          receivers: [otlp]
          processors: [batch]
          exporters: [logging, otlp/lightstep]
  1. Update <YOUR_TOKEN> with a Lightstep access token for your project in Cloud Observability. See the instructions here on how to create and manage access tokens in Cloud Observability.

    If you encounter errors after applying this configuration and/or your telemetry data fails to export from the collector to Cloud Observability remove the quotations around your access token. Some environments require the quotations around tokens with special characters while other environments may treat the quotations as part of the token.

  2. Add the following service definition to the file
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: opentelemetry-collector
  namespace: istio-system
  labels:
    app: opentelemetry-collector
spec:
  ports:
    - name: grpc-otlp # Default endpoint for OpenTelemetry receiver.
      port: 4317
      protocol: TCP
      targetPort: 4317
  selector:
    app: opentelemetry-collector
  1. Add the following deployment to the file
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: opentelemetry-collector
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: opentelemetry-collector
  strategy:
    rollingUpdate:
      maxSurge: 1
      maxUnavailable: 1
    type: RollingUpdate
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: opentelemetry-collector
        sidecar.istio.io/inject: "false" # do not inject
    spec:
      containers:
        - command:
            - "/otelcol"
            - "--config=/conf/opentelemetry-collector-config.yaml"
          env:
            - name: POD_NAME
              valueFrom:
                fieldRef:
                  apiVersion: v1
                  fieldPath: metadata.name
            - name: POD_NAMESPACE
              valueFrom:
                fieldRef:
                  apiVersion: v1
                  fieldPath: metadata.namespace
          image: otel/opentelemetry-collector:0.71.0
          imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
          name: opentelemetry-collector
          ports:
            - containerPort: 4317
              protocol: TCP
          resources:
            limits:
              cpu: "2"
              memory: 4Gi
            requests:
              cpu: 200m
              memory: 400Mi
          terminationMessagePath: /dev/termination-log
          terminationMessagePolicy: File
          volumeMounts:
            - name: opentelemetry-collector-config-vol
              mountPath: /conf
      dnsPolicy: ClusterFirst
      restartPolicy: Always
      schedulerName: default-scheduler
      terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
      volumes:
        - configMap:
            defaultMode: 420
            items:
              - key: opentelemetry-collector-config
                path: opentelemetry-collector-config.yaml
            name: opentelemetry-collector-conf
          name: opentelemetry-collector-config-vol
  1. Deploy the collector to the istio-system namespace in the cluster
kubectl apply -f otel-collector.yaml -n istio-system

This example uses a specific version of the collector. To use the latest version or some other preferred version, update the image with the latest version of the opentelemetry-collector. See here for the list of collector releases.

The OpenTelemetry Collector is now deployed and running in the cluster. Now we need to configure Istio to send the distributed tracing data to the collector.

next: Configure Istio Telemetry