README.md

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Getting Started   •   Getting Involved   •   Migrating from Smart Agent

Components   •   Monitoring   •   Security   •   Sizing   •   Troubleshooting

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Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector for Kubernetes

The Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector for Kubernetes is a Helm chart for the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector. This chart creates a Kubernetes DaemonSet along with other Kubernetes objects in a Kubernetes cluster and provides a unified way to receive, process and export metric, trace, and log data for:

• Splunk Enterprise
• Splunk Cloud Platform
• Splunk Observability Cloud

Installations that use this distribution can receive direct help from Splunk's support teams. Customers are free to use the core OpenTelemetry OSS components (several do!) and we will provide best effort guidance to them for any issues that crop up, however only the Splunk distributions are in scope for official Splunk support and support-related SLAs.

This distribution currently supports:

• Splunk APM via the sapm exporter. The otlphttp exporter can be used with a custom configuration. More information available here.
• Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring via the signalfx exporter. More information available here.
• Splunk Log Observer via the splunk_hec exporter.
• Splunk Cloud or Splunk Enterprise via the splunk_hec exporter.

The Helm chart currently uses Fluentd by default for Kubernetes logs collection, and supports an option to use native OpenTelemetry logs collection for higher throughput and performance. See the logs collection section for more information, along with performance benchmarks run internally.

🚧 This project is currently in BETA. It is officially supported by Splunk. However, breaking changes MAY be introduced.

Supported Kubernetes distributions

This helm chart is tested and works with default configurations on the following Kubernetes distributions:

• Vanilla (unmodified version) Kubernetes
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
• Azure Kubernetes Service
• Google Kubernetes Engine
• Red Hat OpenShift

While this helm chart should work for other Kubernetes distributions, it may require additional configurations applied to values.yaml.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are required to use the helm chart:

• Helm 3 (Helm 2 is not supported)

• Kubernetes cluster

• To send data to Splunk Enterprise/Cloud

  • HEC Token
  • HEC Endpoint

• To send data to Splunk Observability Cloud

  • Splunk Access Token
  • Splunk Realm

How to install

In order to install Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector in a Kubernetes cluster, at least one of the destinations (splunkPlatform or splunkObservability) has to be configured.

For Splunk Enterprise/Cloud the following parameters are required:

• splunkPlatform.endpoint: URL to a Splunk instance, e.g. "http://localhost:8088/services/collector"
• splunkPlatform.token: Splunk HTTP Event Collector token

For Splunk Observability Cloud the following parameters are required:

• splunkObservability.realm: Splunk realm to send telemetry data to.
• splunkObservability.accessToken: Your Splunk Observability org access token.
• clusterName: arbitrary value that will identify your Kubernetes cluster in Splunk Observability Cloud.

To deploy the chart to send data to Splunk Observability Cloud run the following commands replacing the parameters above with their appropriate values.

$ helm repo add splunk-otel-collector-chart https://signalfx.github.io/splunk-otel-collector-chart
$ helm install my-splunk-otel-collector --set="splunkObservability.realm=us0,splunkObservability.accessToken=xxxxxx,clusterName=my-cluster" splunk-otel-collector-chart/splunk-otel-collector

Instead of setting helm values as arguments a YAML file can be provided:

$ helm install my-splunk-otel-collector --values my_values.yaml splunk-otel-collector-chart/splunk-otel-collector

The rendered directory contains pre-rendered Kubernetes resource manifests.

How to uninstall

To uninstall/delete a deployment with name my-splunk-otel-collector:

$ helm delete my-splunk-otel-collector

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

Advanced Configuration

To fully configure the Helm chart, see the advanced configuration.

License

Apache Software License version 2.0.