Observing Traefik with OpenTelemetry and Dash0

Traefik stands out among ingress controllers by fully embracing OpenTelemetry, providing native support for tracing, metrics, and experimental log exports, positioning it as one of the most OpenTelemetry-friendly options available. Unlike Ingress-NGINX and Contour, which require additional setup for comprehensive observability, Traefik supports OpenTelemetry traces and metrics natively and can export logs over OTLP, albeit still in an experimental phase. Designed for cloud-native environments, Traefik features dynamic service discovery, middleware chains, and CRD-driven configuration, with observability deeply integrated into its model, allowing for seamless trace, metric, and log correlation. The OpenTelemetry Collector plays a crucial role in enriching signals with Kubernetes metadata and exporting them to platforms like Dash0, facilitating a unified view across all observability data. Traefik's approach reduces the need for scraping or parsing and demonstrates a cleaner setup compared to its counterparts, making it easier for platform engineers to achieve comprehensive observability from the edge of the cluster to the services behind it.