OTEL Collectors

Overview

The Service Proxy for Kubernetes (SPK) OpenTelemetry (OTEL) collectors gather metrics and statistics such as CPU, memory, disk, virtual server, and network interface usage from the Controller and Traffic Management Microkernel (TMM) Pods. The OTEL collectors integrate with third-party data collection software such as Prometheus to visualize Pod health using applications such as Grafana.

This document guides you through enabling and configuring the SPK OTEL collectors.

OTEL Pod and container

SPK implements two OTEL Collectors; One collector runs as a standalone Pod, gathering metrics and statistics from TMM, and the other collector runs as a sidecar in the Controller Pod, collecting host metrics and statistics directly from the Controller.

_images/spk_info.png Note: The TMM collector is implemented as a separate Pod to optimize 5G application performance.

TMM OTEL Service

With OTEL enabled, a new Service object is created to receive data from the TMM Pod on TCP service port 4317, and forward the data to the OTEL collector Pod on the same service port.

Example OTEL Service:

Name:              otel-collector-svc
Namespace:         spk-utilities
IP:                172.30.186.33
Port:              otlp-grpc  4317/TCP
Endpoints:         10.128.0.89:4317

Fetching OTEL Data

Once the SPK Controller, TMM and OTEL Pods become available, data collectors such as Prometheus can begin fetching statistics on TCP service port 9090.

_images/spk_info.png Note: The full list of OTEL statistics can be reviewed here.

OTEL Parameters

The table below describes the available f5-stats_collector parameters.

_images/spk_warn.png Important: Modifying any OTEL parameters other than those listed below, may compromise the security of the Kubernetes infrastructure.

Parameter Description
enabled Enables the OTEL collection Pods: true or false (default).
nodeSelector The node selector for pod assignment for the OTEL pods.
tolerations The tolerations of the OTEL pods.
affinity The affinity of the OTEL pods.
image The local repository IP address or hostname.

Requirements

Prior to configuring OTEL, ensure you have:

Procedures

Helm parameters

The following steps detail the Helm parameters required to enable the OTEL collection Pod, and how to verify the OTEL collectors status.

_images/spk_info.png Note: The OTEL ollectors are disabled by default.

  1. Add the Helm parameters below to the SPK Controller’s Helm values file, and modify the image.repository parameter for your internal image registry:

    f5-stats_collector:
      enabled: true
      image:
        name: opentelemetry-collector
        repository: "local.registry.com"
      stats_collector:
        image:
          name: opentelemetry-collector 
          repository: "local.registry.com"
    
    f5-toda-logging:
      enabled: true
      type: stdout
    
      fluentd:
        host: "localhost"
    
      tmstats:
        enabled: true
        config:
          image:
            repository: "local.registry.com"
    
      sidecar:
        image: 
          repository: "local.registry.com"
    
  2. Continue to the SPK Controller guide.

Pod Status

Use these steps to obtain the OTEL Pod status:

  1. Verify the TMM otel-collector Pod is Running:

    oc get pods -n spk-ingress | grep otel
    

    In this example, the OTEL Pod is Running.

    otel-collector-6d558c946b-8hvz5    1/1    Running   
    
  2. Verify the F5Ingress otel-collector container is Running:

    kubectl get pods -n spk-ingress | grep f5ingress
    

    In this example, all 4/4 containers are Running.

    f5ingress-f5ingress-5cbc875489-ngt9g   4/4     Running   0
    
  3. Data collectors can now fetch metrics from the Controller and TMM on service port 9090 in the spk-ingress Project.

SSL/TLS Certificates

To create SSL/TLS certificates for communication with 3rd party such as Prometheus, click here.

Next step

The Performance Visualization guide provides a very basic set of steps for integrating the OTEL collectors with Prometheus and Grafana.

Feedback

Provide feedback to improve this document by emailing spkdocs@f5.com.

Supplemental