OpenTelemetry Collector (OTel)

Route agentgateway traces through an OpenTelemetry Collector to fan out to multiple backends or apply processing pipelines.

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic proxy that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data. For production deployments, routing agentgateway traces through a collector lets you fan out to multiple backends, apply processing pipelines such as batching or filtering, and swap backends without changing your agentgateway configuration.

The way you set up the OTel Collector depends on how you installed agentgateway.

Run the OTel Collector as a Docker container on the same host as agentgateway and point agentgateway at localhost:4317.

Create an otel-collector-config.yaml file that defines the OTLP receiver, a batch processor, and your chosen exporter.

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4317

processors:
  batch:

exporters:
  debug:
    verbosity: detailed

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [debug]

Replace the debug exporter with the exporter for your tracing backend. For a full example that exports to Jaeger, see the otel-collector-config.yaml file.

Start the OTel Collector container and mount your config file.

docker run -d --name otel-collector \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  -v $(pwd)/otel-collector-config.yaml:/etc/otelcol/config.yaml \
  otel/opentelemetry-collector:latest

Configure agentgateway to send traces to the collector.

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://agentgateway.dev/schema/config
frontendPolicies:
  tracing:
    host: localhost:4317
    randomSampling: true

When you are done, remove the OTel Collector container.
```
docker rm -f otel-collector
```

Deploy the OTel Collector into your cluster by using the OpenTelemetry Helm chart and point agentgateway at its service.

Add the OpenTelemetry Helm repository.

helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
helm repo update

Create a values.yaml file that defines the collector pipeline.

mode: deployment
config:
  receivers:
    otlp:
      protocols:
        grpc:
          endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4317
  processors:
    batch:
  exporters:
    debug:
      verbosity: detailed
  service:
    pipelines:
      traces:
        receivers: [otlp]
        processors: [batch]
        exporters: [debug]

Replace the debug exporter with the exporter for your tracing backend. For a full example that exports to Jaeger, see the otel-collector-config.yaml file.

Install the OTel Collector chart.

helm install otel-collector open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector \
  -n monitoring --create-namespace \
  -f values.yaml

Verify that the collector pod is running.
```
kubectl get pods -n monitoring
```
Update your agentgateway values.yaml to send traces to the collector service. The chart takes the agentgateway configuration under the top-level config field.
```
config:
  frontendPolicies:
    tracing:
      host: otel-collector.monitoring.svc.cluster.local:4317
      randomSampling: true
```

Apply the change with a Helm upgrade.

helm upgrade -i agentgateway-standalone \
  oci://cr.agentgateway.dev/charts/agentgateway-standalone \
  --namespace agentgateway-system \
  --version v1.5.0 \
  --reuse-values \
  -f values.yaml

When you are done, remove the OTel Collector and the monitoring namespace.

helm uninstall otel-collector -n monitoring
kubectl delete namespace monitoring

Jaeger

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OpenTelemetry Collector (OTel)

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