OpenTelemetry Operator Chart

Introduction

The OpenTelemetry Operator is a Kubernetes operator that manages OpenTelemetry Collectors and auto-instrumentation of workloads. One of the ways to install the OpenTelemetry Operator is via the OpenTelemetry Operator Helm Chart.

For detailed use of the OpenTelemetry Operator visit its docs.

Installing the Chart

To install the chart with the release name my-opentelemetry-operator, run the following commands:

helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
helm install my-opentelemetry-operator open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operator \
  --set "manager.collectorImage.repository=otel/opentelemetry-collector-k8s" \
  --set admissionWebhooks.certManager.enabled=false \
  --set admissionWebhooks.certManager.autoGenerateCert.enabled=true

This will install an OpenTelemetry Operator with a self-signed certificate and secret.

Configuration

The Operator helm chart’s default values.yaml is ready to be installed, but it expects that Cert Manager is already present on the Cluster.

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.create to true. 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.issuerRef value. You will need to specify the kind (Issuer or ClusterIssuer) and the name. Note that this method also requires the installation of cert-manager.
• You can use an automatically generated self-signed certificate by setting admissionWebhooks.certManager.enabled to false and admissionWebhooks.autoGenerateCert.enabled to true. Helm will create a self-signed cert and a secret for you.
• You can use your own generated self-signed certificate by setting both admissionWebhooks.certManager.enabled and admissionWebhooks.autoGenerateCert.enabled to false. You should provide the necessary values to admissionWebhooks.cert_file, admissionWebhooks.key_file, and admissionWebhooks.ca_file.
• You can side-load custom webhooks and certificate by disabling .Values.admissionWebhooks.create and admissionWebhooks.certManager.enabled while setting your custom cert secret name in admissionWebhooks.secretName
• You can disable webhooks all together by disabling .Values.admissionWebhooks.create and setting env var to ENABLE_WEBHOOKS: "false"

All the configuration options (with comments) available in the chart can be viewed in its values.yaml file.