Monitoring Kubernetes infrastructure with OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is an Observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. It is vendor- and tool-agnostic, meaning it can be used with a broad variety of Observability backends, including open-source tools like Jaeger and Prometheus, as well as commercial offerings. OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project. The framework has been evolving over time and is actively contributed to by various companies. It provides a way for Kubernetes clusters to expose their performance insights in a detailed manner, allowing users to have a broader perspective of what's happening in the cluster. Prometheus operates based on a pull-mechanism, but OpenTelemetry collectors can be used to address scalability issues. The OTel collector consists of three major components: receivers, processors, and exporters. It can leverage Prometheus receivers to talk to Kubernetes, with the Target Allocator coming to the rescue for sharding. Kubernetes exposes metrics through dedicated ports, which can be scraped by the Prometheus receiver. Machine-level metrics are collected using Node Exporter, container metrics using cAdvisor, and component state information using kube-state-metrics. The OTel collector also includes a filelog receiver for collecting logs from any component in the cluster. Deploying OTel collectors involves creating a strategy to deploy instances with necessary configurations, building proper dashboards and alerts, and utilizing New Relic Query Language (NRQL) queries. There is a public repository containing everything discussed so far, including a Helm chart and Terraform deployment for easy roll-out of OTel collectors.

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