Chapter 13. Upgrading

For version upgrades, the Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry Operator uses the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM), which controls installation, upgrade, and role-based access control (RBAC) of Operators in a cluster.

The OLM runs in the OpenShift Container Platform by default. The OLM queries for available Operators as well as upgrades for installed Operators.

The Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry Operator automatically upgrades all OpenTelemetryCollector custom resources during its startup. The Operator reconciles all managed instances during its startup. If there is an error, the Operator retries the upgrade at exponential backoff. If an upgrade fails, the Operator will retry the upgrade again when it restarts.

When the Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry Operator is upgraded to the new version, it scans for running OpenTelemetry Collector instances that it manages and upgrades them to the version corresponding to the Operator’s new version.