Install on Kubernetes

This page provides instructions for installing the Observe Agent in a Kubernetes environment to collect metrics, logs, and application telemetry—including OpenTelemetry traces—and forward them to Observe.

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Caution
Amazon EKS Auto Mode and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Automatic are not supported yet.

Install, configure, and deploy the Observe Agent

Access the Add Data portal to install, configure, and deploy the Observe Agent in your Kubernetes environment.

Perform the following steps to access the Add Data portal:

From the left navigation, click Data & integrations > Add Data.
Click Install.
Click Kubernetes.

Make your way through the on-screen instructions, which cover the following tasks:

Task	Description
Create a new ingest token	Click Create to generate a new ingest token. This is required for the Observe Agent to be able to sent data to Observe.
Select data to collect	By default, the Observe agent send container logs to Observe. Slide the Custom Application Metrics toggle to the on position if you want to gather additional metrics from the services and apps that run on the host(s) with a Prometheus scrape. This can result in a lot of extra data being ingested, so make sure you have the appropriate use cases before enabling this option.
Set the cluster name	Set the cluster name used with the `k8s.cluster.name` identifier, such as observe-agent-monitored-cluster.
Send application telemetry to Observe	By default, the Observe Agent also deploys an additional DaemonSet with an OTLP receiver to forward application telemetry, including traces, to Observe.
Fleet monitoring	By default, Observe Agents are included in fleet monitoring. See Fleet Management.
Configure the environment	Specify the environment used with the `deployment.environment.name` identifier, such as prod, or eng.
Add the Observe Helm repository	Run the commands in this section to add the Observe Helm repository to your local Helm setup, allowing you to access and deploy Observe's charts.
Create the Observe namespace and secret	Run the commands in this section to create a Kubernetes namespace called observe and generate a secret. You must provide the ingest token value you obtained earlier.
Deploy the Observe Agent	Run the command in this section to deploy the Observe Agent in the observe namespace using observe-agent-monitored-cluster as the name for your Kubernetes cluster. If you provided a different name for your cluster, use that name instead.
Send application data to the Observe Agent	Configure application performance monitoring (APM) instrumentation on your apps to send OTel data from your apps to the Observe Agent. This includes setting the proper environment variables. See APM instrumentation.
Verify your data is being received	Check the following to verify your data is being recieved: Service Explorer Trace Explorer Kubernetes Explorer

Use a YAML file to configure the Observe Agent

If you don't want to use commands provided in the Add Data portal to configure your Observe Agent, you can configure a YAML file to do so instead. Create observe-agent-values.yaml with the following configuration. Replace <YOUR_OBSERVE_COLLECTION_ENDPOINT> with your instance's collection endpoint. For more information, see values.yaml in Observe's Helm chart documentation in Github.

agent:
  selfMonitor:
    enabled: false
application:
  prometheusScrape:
    enabled: false
cluster:
  events:
    enabled: true
  metrics:
    enabled: true
  name: observe-agent-monitored-cluster
node:
  containers:
    logs:
      enabled: true
    metrics:
      enabled: true
  forwarder:
    enabled: true
    metrics:
      outputFormat: otel
observe:
  collectionEndpoint:
    value: <OBSERVE_COLLECTION_ENDPOINT>
  token:
    create: false

Run the following command to deploy the Observe Agent in the observe namespace:

helm install observe-agent observe/agent -n observe --values observe-agent-values.yaml

Run the following command to make sure the Observe Agent has been deployed successfully.

kubectl get pods -n observe

Uninstall the Observe Agent

Run the following commands to uninstall the Observe Agent from your Kubernetes cluster.

helm uninstall observe-agent -n observe
kubectl -n observe delete secret agent-credentials
kubectl delete namespace observe

Caution

Install, configure, and deploy the Observe Agent

Use a YAML file to configure the Observe Agent

Uninstall the Observe Agent

Further reading