Observing Kubernetes Ingress Controllers with OpenTelemetry

Ingress controllers play a critical role in Kubernetes architecture, serving as key points for distributed traces, access logs, and request-level metrics. The observability at this layer is crucial for understanding and managing operational issues like latency and traffic handling. A recent series of evaluations applied a draft OpenTelemetry Support Maturity Framework to several widely used ingress controllers, including Contour, Emissary, Istio Gateway, kgateway, and Traefik. These projects were assessed across seven dimensions, revealing that while tracing is generally strong due to a shared foundation on Envoy, semantic conventions and metrics often lag behind OpenTelemetry standards. The evaluations highlighted that metrics remain predominantly Prometheus-native, requiring significant pipeline work for multi-signal observability. Traefik stood out for its commitment to OpenTelemetry in logging and metrics, despite being outside the CNCF umbrella. The framework was effective in identifying strengths and gaps, indicating a need for further alignment with OpenTelemetry semantics and stability. As OpenTelemetry adoption grows, especially with 75% of organizations using or evaluating it, the refinement of telemetry practices in ingress controllers is essential for simplifying and standardizing observability across the cloud-native ecosystem.