Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector

10 minutes

In this section we’ll deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector in our OpenShift namespace, which gathers metrics, logs, and traces from the infrastructure and applications running in the cluster, and sends the resulting data to Splunk Observability Cloud.

Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector

Ensure Helm is installed:

helm version

It should return something like the following:

version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.19.4", GitCommit:"7cfb6e486dac026202556836bb910c37d847793e", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.24.11"}

If it’s not installed, execute the following commands:

sudo apt-get install curl gpg apt-transport-https --yes
curl -fsSL https://packages.buildkite.com/helm-linux/helm-debian/gpgkey | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/helm.gpg > /dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/helm.gpg] https://packages.buildkite.com/helm-linux/helm-debian/any/ any main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/helm-stable-debian.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install helm

Add the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector for Kubernetes’ Helm chart repository:

helm repo add splunk-otel-collector-chart https://signalfx.github.io/splunk-otel-collector-chart

Ensure the repository is up-to-date:

helm repo update

Review the file named ./otel-collector/otel-collector-values.yaml as we’ll be using it to install the OpenTelemetry collector.

Set environment variables to configure the Splunk environment you’d like the collector to send data to:

Note: add your workshop participant number before running the command below

export USER_NAME=workshop-participant-<number>
export CLUSTER_NAME=ai-pod-$USER_NAME
export ENVIRONMENT_NAME=ai-pod-$USER_NAME
export SPLUNK_INDEX=splunk4rookies-workshop

Navigate to the workshop directory:

cd ~/workshop/cisco-ai-pods

Then install the collector in your namespace using the following command:

helm install splunk-otel-collector \
  --set="clusterName=$CLUSTER_NAME" \
  --set="environment=$ENVIRONMENT_NAME" \
  --set="splunkObservability.accessToken=$ACCESS_TOKEN" \
  --set="splunkObservability.realm=$REALM" \
  --set="splunkPlatform.endpoint=$HEC_URL" \
  --set="splunkPlatform.token=$HEC_TOKEN" \
  --set="splunkPlatform.index=$SPLUNK_INDEX" \
  -f ./otel-collector/otel-collector-values.yaml \
  -n $USER_NAME \
  splunk-otel-collector-chart/splunk-otel-collector

Run the following command to confirm that the collector pods are running:

oc get pods

NAME                                                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
splunk-otel-collector-agent-58rwm                             1/1     Running   0          6m40s
splunk-otel-collector-agent-8dndr                             1/1     Running   0          6m40s

Confirm that you can see the cluster in Splunk Observability Cloud by navigating to Infrastructure Monitoring -> Kubernetes -> Kubernetes Clusters and then filtering on your cluster name: