Quickstart

☸️ Kubernetes

🆂 Self-managed Elastic Stack

The quick start for Kubernetes with a self-managed Elastic Stack covers the collection of OpenTelemetry data for infrastructure monitoring, logs collection and application monitoring.

1. Add the OpenTelemetry repository to Helm

    helm repo add open-telemetry 'https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts' --force-update
   

2. Setup Credentials

   Retrieve your Elasticsearch endpoint and API key and replace both in the below command to create a namespace and a secret with your credentials.

    kubectl create namespace opentelemetry-operator-system
    kubectl create secret generic elastic-secret-otel \
    --namespace opentelemetry-operator-system \
    --from-literal=elastic_endpoint='<ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT>' \
    --from-literal=elastic_api_key='<BASE64_APIKEY>'
   

3. Install Operator

   Install the OpenTelemetry Operator using the kube-stack Helm chart with the pre-configured values.yaml file.

    helm install opentelemetry-kube-stack open-telemetry/opentelemetry-kube-stack \
    --namespace opentelemetry-operator-system \
    --values 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/elastic-agent/refs/tags/v8.17.3/deploy/helm/edot-collector/kube-stack/values.yaml' \
    --version '0.3.9'
   

4. Auto-instrument Applications

   Add a language-specific annotation to your namespace by replacing <LANGUAGE> with one of the supported values (nodejs, java, python, dotnet or go) in the below command.

    kubectl annotate namespace YOUR_NAMESPACE instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-<LANGUAGE>="opentelemetry-operator-system/elastic-instrumentation"
   

   Restart your deployment to ensure the annotations and auto-instrumentations are applied.

   For languages where auto-instrumentation is not available, you will need to manually instrument your application. See the Setup section in the corresponding SDK.