Deployment

You can use the guided onboarding or deploy all components manually

Deploy components using the guided onboarding

The guided onboarding simplifies deploying your Kubernetes components by setting up an API Key and the needed Integrations in the background. Follow these steps to use the guided onboarding:

1. In Kibana, navigate to Observability → Add data.
2. Select Kubernetes, then choose Kubernetes monitoring with EDOT Collector.
3. Follow the on-screen instructions to install the OpenTelemetry Operator using the Helm chart and the provided values.yaml.

Notes on installing the OpenTelemetry Operator:

• Make sure the elastic_endpoint shown in the installation command is valid for your environment. If not, replace it with the correct Elasticsearch endpoint.
• The elastic_api_key shown in the installation command corresponds to an API key created by Kibana when the onboarding process is initiated.

The default installation deploys an OpenTelemetry Operator with a self-signed TLS certificate. To automatically generate and renew certificates, refer to cert-manager integrated installation for instructions on customizing the values.yaml file before running the helm install command.

Manual deployment of all components

Elastic Stack preparations

Before installing the operator follow these actions:

1. Create an API Key, and make note of its value. (TBD: details of API key permissions).

2. Install the following integrations in Kibana:

   • System
   • Kubernetes
   • Kubernetes OpenTelemetry Assets

Notes:

• When using the Kibana onboarding UX, the previous actions are automatically handled by Kibana.

Operator Installation

1. Create the opentelemetry-operator-system Kubernetes namespace:

    $ kubectl create namespace opentelemetry-operator-system
   

2. Create a secret in the created namespace with the following command:

   kubectl create -n opentelemetry-operator-system secret generic elastic-secret-otel \
     --from-literal=elastic_endpoint='YOUR_ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT' \
     --from-literal=elastic_api_key='YOUR_ELASTICSEARCH_API_KEY'
   

   Don’t forget to replace

   • YOUR_ELASTICSEARCH_ENDPOINT: Elasticsearch endpoint (with https:// prefix). For example: https://1234567.us-west2.gcp.elastic-cloud.com:443.
   • YOUR_ELASTICSEARCH_API_KEY: Elasticsearch API Key created in the previous step.

3. If you need to customize the configuration, make a copy of the values.yaml file and adapt it to your needs. Refer to the compatibility matrix for a complete list of available manifests in the release branches.

4. Run the following commands to deploy the opentelemetry-kube-stack Helm chart, using the appropriate values file:

    helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
    helm repo update
    helm upgrade --install --namespace opentelemetry-operator-system opentelemetry-kube-stack open-telemetry/opentelemetry-kube-stack \
          --values 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/elastic-agent/refs/tags/v8.17.3/deploy/helm/edot-collector/kube-stack/values.yaml' \
          --version 0.3.3
   

Installation verification

Regardless of the installation method followed, perform the following checks to verify that everything is running properly:

1. Check Pods Status
   • Ensure the following components are running without errors:
     • Operator Pod
     • DaemonSet Collector Pod
     • Deployment Collector Pod
2. Validate Instrumentation Object
   • Confirm that the Instrumentation object is deployed and configured with a valid endpoint.
3. Kibana Dashboard Check
   • Verify that the [OTEL][Metrics Kubernetes] Cluster Overview dashboard in Kibana is displaying data correctly.
4. Log Data Availability in Kibana
   • In Kibana Discover, confirm the availability of data under the __logs-*__ data view.
5. Metrics Data Availability in Kibana
   • In Kibana Discover, ensure data is available under the __metrics-*__ data view.