Chapter 4. Configuring Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing data collection with Service Mesh

Procedure

1. Navigate to the Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing data collection Operator and install the OpenTelemetryCollector resource in the istio-system namespace:

   Example OpenTelemetry Collector in istio-system namespace

   kind: OpenTelemetryCollector
   apiVersion: opentelemetry.io/v1beta1
   metadata:
     name: otel
     namespace: istio-system
   spec:
     observability:
       metrics: {}
     deploymentUpdateStrategy: {}
     config:
       exporters:
         otlp:
           endpoint: 'tempo-sample-distributor.tempo.svc.cluster.local:4317'
           tls:
             insecure: true
       receivers:
         otlp:
           protocols:
             grpc:
               endpoint: '0.0.0.0:4317'
             http: {}
       service:
         pipelines:
           traces:
             exporters:
               - otlp
             receivers:
               - otlp

2. Configure Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh to enable tracing, and define the distributed tracing data collection tracing providers in your meshConfig:

   Example enabling tracing and defining tracing providers

   apiVersion: sailoperator.io/v1alpha1
   kind: Istio
   metadata:
   #  ...
     name: default
   spec:
     namespace: istio-system
   #  ...
     values:
       meshConfig:
         enableTracing: true
         extensionProviders:
         - name: otel-tracing
           opentelemetry:
             port: 4317
             service: otel-collector.istio-system.svc.cluster.local 1

   1

   The service field is the OpenTelemetry collector service in the istio-system namespace.

3. Create an Istio Telemetry resource to enable tracers defined in spec.values.meshConfig.ExtensionProviders:

   Example Istio Telemetry resource

   apiVersion: telemetry.istio.io/v1
   kind: Telemetry
   metadata:
     name: otel-demo
     namespace: istio-system
   spec:
     tracing:
       - providers:
           - name: otel-tracing
         randomSamplingPercentage: 100

   Note

   Once you verify that you can see traces, lower the randomSamplingPercentage value or set it to default to reduce the number of requests.

4. Deploy the bookinfo application in bookinfo namespace:

   oc create ns bookinfo

   oc label ns <namespace_name> istio.io/rev= 1

   oc apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/istio/istio/release-1.23/samples/bookinfo/platform/kube/bookinfo.yaml -n bookinfo

   1

   If you named your Istio resource default and are using the InPlace upgrade strategy, use oc label ns bookinfo istio-injection=enabled.

   Note

   To find your <revision-name>, run the following command:

   oc get istiorevisions.sailoperator.io

   Sample output:

   NAME              TYPE    READY   STATUS    IN USE   VERSION   AGE
   default-v1-23-0   Local   True    Healthy   False    v1.23.0   3m33s

5. Generate traffic to the productpage pod to generate traces:

   $ oc exec -it -n bookinfo deployments/productpage-v1 -c istio-proxy -- curl localhost:9080/productpage

6. Validate the integration by running the following command to see traces in the UI:

   $ kubectl get routes -n tempo tempo-sample-query-frontend