Quickstart for Kubernetes on Elastic Cloud Serverless

Learn how to set up the Elastic Agent and EDOT SDKs in a Kubernetes environment with Elastic Cloud Serverless to collect host metrics, logs and application traces.

Guided setup

The fastest way to get started is the Add data screen in Elastic Observability. It generates install commands with your endpoint and API key already included.

Open Elastic Observability.
Go to Add data.
Select what you want to monitor.
Follow the instructions.

Prerequisites

To use the OpenTelemetry Kube Stack Chart, you need Helm version 3.9+ up to and including 4.3.0.

Manual installation

Follow these steps to deploy the Elastic Agent and EDOT SDKs in Kubernetes.

Add the OpenTelemetry repository to Helm

Run the following command to add the charts repository to Helm:
Shell
```
helm repo add open-telemetry 'https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts' --force-update
```
Set up connection and credentials

Follow these steps to retrieve the managed OTLP endpoint URL for your Serverless project:
1. In Elastic Cloud Serverless, open your Observability project.
2. Go to Add data → Application → OpenTelemetry.
3. Select Managed OTLP Endpoint in the second step.
4. Copy the OTLP endpoint configuration value.
5. Select Create API Key to generate an API key.
Replace <ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT> and <ELASTIC_API_KEY> in the following command to create a namespace and a secret with your credentials.
Shell
```
kubectl create namespace opentelemetry-operator-system
kubectl create secret generic elastic-secret-otel \
--namespace opentelemetry-operator-system \
--from-literal=elastic_otlp_endpoint='<ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT>' \
--from-literal=elastic_api_key='<ELASTIC_API_KEY>'
```
Install the operator

Install the OpenTelemetry Operator using the kube-stack Helm chart with the configured values.yaml file.
Shell
```
helm install opentelemetry-kube-stack open-telemetry/opentelemetry-kube-stack \
--namespace opentelemetry-operator-system \
--values 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/elastic-agent/refs/tags/v9.5.6/deploy/helm/edot-collector/kube-stack/managed_otlp/values.yaml' \
--version '0.16.0'
```
The Operator provides a deployment of the Elastic Agent and configuration environment variables. This allows SDKs and instrumentation to send data to the Elastic Agent without further configuration.

Deploy on OpenShift
Elastic Agent 9.5+
Elastic Agent can run in OpenTelemetry mode to retrieve traces, metrics, and logs from your infrastructure and applications, and forward them to Elastic Observability.

Availability
- Generally available since 9.5
  
  This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.
This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.
On OpenShift, follow the manual installation instructions and use the following command to apply the OpenShift values file after the managed_otlp values file:
Shell
```
helm install opentelemetry-kube-stack open-telemetry/opentelemetry-kube-stack \
--namespace opentelemetry-operator-system \
--values 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/elastic-agent/refs/tags/v9.5.6/deploy/helm/edot-collector/kube-stack/managed_otlp/values.yaml' \
--values 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/elastic-agent/refs/tags/v9.5.6/deploy/helm/edot-collector/kube-stack/openshift/values.yaml' \
--version '0.16.0'
```
The OpenShift values file configures the chart to run with least privilege, including a custom security context constraints (SCC) resource for the daemon collector. For details, refer to Deploy on OpenShift.
Auto-instrument applications

Add a language-specific annotation to your namespace by replacing <LANGUAGE> with one of the supported values (nodejs, java, python, dotnet or go) in the following command.
Shell
```
kubectl annotate namespace YOUR_NAMESPACE instrumentation.opentelemetry.io/inject-<LANGUAGE>="opentelemetry-operator-system/elastic-instrumentation"
```
The OpenTelemetry Operator automatically provides the OTLP endpoint configuration and authentication to the SDKs through environment variables. Restart your deployment to ensure the annotations and auto-instrumentations are applied.

For languages where auto-instrumentation is not available, manually instrument your application. See the Setup section in the corresponding SDK.
Explore your data

Go to Kibana and select Dashboards to explore your newly collected data.

Troubleshooting

The following issues might occur.

API Key prefix not found

The following error is due to an improperly formatted API key:

Exporting failed. Dropping data.
{"kind": "exporter", "data_type": }
"Unauthenticated desc = ApiKey prefix not found"

Format your API key as "Authorization": "ApiKey <api-key-value-here>" or "Authorization=ApiKey <api-key>" depending on whether you're using a Collector or SDK.

Error: too many requests

The managed endpoint has per-project rate limits in place. If you reach this limit, contact our support team.