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Get Started with the OpenTelemetry plugin

By Kong Inc.
You are browsing documentation for an outdated plugin version.

Note: The OpenTelemetry plugin only works when Kong Gateway’s opentelemetry_tracing configuration is enabled.

The OpenTelemetry plugin is fully compatible with the OpenTelemetry specification and can be used with any OpenTelemetry compatible backend.

There are two ways to set up an OpenTelemetry backend:

Set up Kong Gateway

The OpenTelemetry tracing capability supported by this plugin requires the following Kong Gateway configuration:

  • opentelemetry_tracing = all: Enables all possible tracing instrumentations. Valid values can be found in Kong’s configuration reference.
  • opentelemetry_tracing_sampling_rate = 1.0: Tracing instrumentation sampling rate. Tracer samples a fixed percentage of all spans following the sampling rate. Set the sampling rate to a lower value to reduce the impact of the instrumentation on Kong Gateway’s proxy performance in production.

Set up an OpenTelemetry compatible backend

This section is optional if you are using a OpenTelemetry compatible APM vendor. All the supported vendors are listed in the OpenTelemetry’s Vendor support.

Jaeger natively supports OpenTelemetry starting with v1.35 and can be used with the OpenTelemetry plugin.

Deploy a Jaeger instance with Docker:

docker run --name jaeger \
  -e COLLECTOR_OTLP_ENABLED=true \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  -p 4318:4318 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:1.36

  • The COLLECTOR_OTLP_ENABLED environment variable must be set to true to enable the OpenTelemetry Collector.

  • The 4318 port is the OTLP/HTTP port and the 4317 port is the OTLP/GRPC port that isn’t supported by the OpenTelemetry plugin yet.

Set up an OpenTelemetry Collector

This section is required if you are using an incompatible OpenTelemetry APM vendor.

Create a config file (otelcol.yaml) for the OpenTelemetry Collector:

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
      http:

processors:
  batch:

exporters:
  logging:
    loglevel: debug
  zipkin:
    endpoint: "http://some.url:9411/api/v2/spans"
    tls:
      insecure: true

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [logging, zipkin]

Run the OpenTelemetry Collector with Docker:

docker run --name opentelemetry-collector \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  -p 4318:4318 \
  -p 55679:55679 \
  -v $(pwd)/otelcol.yaml:/etc/otel-collector-config.yaml \
  otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:0.52.0 \
  --config=/etc/otel-collector-config.yaml

See the OpenTelemetry Collector documentation for more information.

Configure the OpenTelemetry plugin

Make the following request:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/plugins/ \
    --header "accept: application/json" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
    --data '
    {
  "name": "opentelemetry",
  "config": {
    "endpoint": "http://<opentelemetry-backend>:4318/v1/traces",
    "resource_attributes": {
      "service.name": "kong-dev"
    }
  }
}
    '

Make the following request, substituting your own access token, region, and control plane ID:

curl -X POST \
https://{us|eu}.api.konghq.com/v2/control-planes/{controlPlaneId}/core-entities/plugins/ \
    --header "accept: application/json" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
    --header "Authorization: Bearer TOKEN" \
    --data '{"name":"opentelemetry","config":{"endpoint":"http://<opentelemetry-backend>:4318/v1/traces","resource_attributes":{"service.name":"kong-dev"}}}'

See the Konnect API reference to learn about region-specific URLs and personal access tokens.

Create a KongClusterPlugin resource and label it as global:

apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1
kind: KongClusterPlugin
metadata:
  name: <global-opentelemetry>
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: kong
  labels:
    global: "true"
config:
  endpoint: http://<opentelemetry-backend>:4318/v1/traces
  resource_attributes:
    service.name: kong-dev
plugin: opentelemetry

Add a plugins entry in the declarative configuration file:

plugins:
- name: opentelemetry
  config:
    endpoint: http://<opentelemetry-backend>:4318/v1/traces
    resource_attributes:
      service.name: kong-dev

More information