Monitoring Kubernetes infrastructure with OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-agnostic observability framework designed to manage telemetry data like traces, metrics, and logs across various backends, including both open-source tools and commercial offerings. As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project, OpenTelemetry can work seamlessly with Kubernetes, which is a highly scalable platform for managing containerized applications. The blog discusses how to leverage OpenTelemetry collectors with Prometheus to efficiently gather and handle Kubernetes metrics, addressing the challenges of scalability and dynamic environments through components like the Prometheus receiver and Target Allocator. Additionally, it explores collecting Kubernetes events and logs, with tools like the k8sevents receiver and filelog receiver, to enhance monitoring capabilities. The article also outlines strategies for deploying OpenTelemetry collector instances and integrating them with New Relic to create comprehensive dashboards and alerts, providing resources for implementation and encouraging contributions to a public repository that supports these solutions.