Prerequisites and compatibility for Kubernetes observability with Elastic OpenTelemetry
Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud. Availability This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage. The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats. Availability This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage. Unless stated otherwise on the page, this functionality is available when your Elastic Stack is deployed on Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, and self-managed environments. 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. 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 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.
Serverless Observability
Generally available
Stack
Generally available
Elastic Agent
Generally available
Before setting up observability for Kubernetes, make sure you have the following:
Elastic Stack (self-managed or Elastic Cloud) version 8.16.0 or higher, or an Elasticsearch Serverless project.
A Kubernetes version supported by the OpenTelemetry Operator. Refer to the operator's compatibility matrix for more details.
If you opt for automatic certificate generation and renewal on the OpenTelemetry Operator, install cert-manager in the Kubernetes cluster. By default, the operator uses a self-signed certificate and doesn't require cert-manager.
The minimum supported version of the Elastic Stack for OpenTelemetry-based monitoring on Kubernetes is 8.16.0. Different Elastic Stack releases support specific versions of the kube-stack Helm chart.
Use the values file and installation instructions for your deployment mode:
| Deployment mode | Values file | Installation instructions |
|---|---|---|
| Direct ingestion into Elasticsearch | kube-stack/values.yaml |
Deploy Elastic OpenTelemetry for Kubernetes observability |
| Elastic Cloud Managed OTLP Endpoint on Elastic Cloud Hosted | kube-stack/managed_otlp/values.yaml |
Quickstart for Kubernetes on Elastic Cloud Hosted |
| Elastic Cloud Managed OTLP Endpoint on Serverless | kube-stack/managed_otlp/values.yaml |
Quickstart for Kubernetes on Elastic Cloud Serverless |
For Elastic Stack 8.16.0, use the values file from the elastic/opentelemetry repository instead.
The latest supported kube-stack Helm chart version is 0.16.0.