This topic describes how to install an OpenTelemetry Collector in Kubernetes to collect infrastructure and application metrics and send them to Lightstep. To simplify the configuration of the OpenTelemetry Collector, a StatefulSet is used with the Target Allocator’s PrometheusCRD functionality enabled. This behavior allows the Collector to dynamically discover new jobs.

Prerequisites

Install the kube-otel-stack chart

  1. From the Lightstep otel-collector-charts repository, copy the kube-otel-stack folder to your existing directory.

  2. Set the shell variable LS_TOKEN to your Lightstep access token. 
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    export LS_TOKEN=”<ACCESS_TOKEN>”

  3. Disable any Kubernetes Infrastructure Components you do not need

    By default, the values.yaml for the kube-otel-stack has the following components enabled for scraping:

    • kubeApiServer
    • kubelet
    • kubeControllerManager
    • coreDns
    • kubeDns
    • kubeEtcd
    • kubeScheduler
    • kubeProxy
    • kubeStateMetrics

    You can disable any of them by setting enabled: false

  4. Install the chart using the kube-otel-stack/values.yaml values. 
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    kubectl create namespace opentelemetry
kubectl create secret generic otel-collector-secret -n opentelemetry --from-literal=LS_TOKEN=$LS_TOKEN
helm dependency update
helm upgrade lightstep ./charts/kube-otel-stack -f ./charts/kube-otel-stack/values.yaml -n opentelemetry --install
  5. Verify that the StatefulSet Collector is up and running, You should see three pods in “ready” state in the namespace. 
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    kubectl get statefulset -n opentelemetry

Next steps

Now that you are succesfully scraping Collector, Operator, Target Allocator, and Kubernetes infrastructure metrics, you can use our pre-built dashboards to monitor them. Or you can use the terraform dashboards. If in the future you have applications that emit Prometheus metrics, you can use ServiceMonitors and PodMonitors to scrape them.