OpenTelemetry in Practice: Kubernetes & the Collector

About the Series

Welcome to the OpenTelemetry in Practice series! This is a new experiment by some OpenTelemetry contributors in the End User Working Group.

We’re aiming to:

  • Address practical problems that commonly stop development teams from succeeding with OpenTelemetry
  • Build stronger connections with developers focused on specific languages
  • Improve the experience of implementing OpenTelemetry in production

Each OpenTelemetry in Practice session will include a half hour of lightning talks and a half hour of open conversation about the topic. We are looking for people to join the OpenTelemetry in Practice team and people to give talks at future events. So if you’re interested in shaping these conversations, reach out in the #otel-user-research channel of the CNCF Slack.

Our first conversation will be on August 23rd, at 10 AM PDT, on Zoom, and the topic is Kubernetes & The Collector.

Talks

Our lightning talks include the following.

Collector Configuration and Troubleshooting in Kubernetes

— by Jessica Kerr, Honeycomb

Let’s talk about getting the OpenTelemetry Collector working in Kubernetes. Jess will run the Collector using the OpenTelemetry helm chart, and then tweak the configuration until it works. She’ll demonstrate two techniques for troubleshooting and warn about some pitfalls. Then, share your victories and frustrations with the Collector.

Observability Pipelines for Kubernetes

— by Daniel Kim, New Relic

When doing observability, we need to collect signals from many different data sources, frameworks and programming languages. We can turn heterogeneous data across so many different signals into actionable insights through a framework like OpenTelemetry. In this talk Daniel will show you how to build an observability data pipeline using the OpenTelemetry Collector and open source plugins that can perform a wide variety of data processing, such as injecting infrastructure metadata into traces and metrics, implementing tail-based sampling, and exporting data to any backend via OTLP. Finally, he will share some of the challenges with running the Collector, so that you can take them into account as you build out your own observability pipeline with OpenTelemetry.