Observing Emissary Ingress with OpenTelemetry and Dash0

Ingress controllers are crucial components in Kubernetes clusters, managing external traffic flow to services by handling TLS termination, routing, and policy enforcement. The post highlights the observability challenges and solutions for Kubernetes ingress controllers using OpenTelemetry, focusing on Emissary Ingress, formerly Ambassador API Gateway. Emissary, built on Envoy, extends to a comprehensive API gateway, emphasizing the importance of observability due to its complexity. The demo showcases how to implement tracing, metrics, and logs with OpenTelemetry, using the Collector to integrate these signals into a cohesive observability solution. Emissary's tracing setup lies between Contour and Traefik, requiring a single TracingService configuration, while its metrics are extensive, akin to Contour's, exposing Envoy and ambassador_* series. Logs are transformed to include trace context for correlation, which is handled by the OpenTelemetry Collector. This setup enables a unified view of ingress behavior, crucial for platform transparency and reliability. The post encourages hands-on experience with Emissary and OpenTelemetry through the dash0-examples repository, demonstrating how it transforms the ingress layer into a transparent, manageable part of the platform.