Lab 2
Deploying the application

Demo Architecture

First, we need to create a Kubernetes Secret with the URL and secret token of the APM Server. This secret will be used by the OpenTelemetry collector to forward the data to the APM Server running in Elastic Cloud.

3. On your machine, create environment variables for the URL and secret token. We'll use these environment variables to create the Kubernetes Secret.

Copy the predefined URL that the APM Server listens to, without the HTTPS prefix. Create an environment variable for the URL on your machine

export APM_URL_WITHOUT_PREFIX=<your-url>

 ⚠️ Make sure to include the port number to your APM endpoint URL, for example "opentelemetry-workshop.apm.eu-west-1.aws.found.io:443".

Next, do the same thing for the secret token

export APM_SECRET_TOKEN=<your-secret-token>

4. Create a secret in Kubernetes using the following command

kubectl create secret generic elastic-secret --from-literal=elastic_apm_endpoint=$APM_URL_WITHOUT_PREFIX --from-literal=elastic_apm_secret_token=$APM_SECRET_TOKEN

We will use Helm to install the official OpenTelemetry demo application. First, we need to add the OpenTelemetry chart repository

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

Next, we will install the demo application. The OpenTelemetry Helm chart also includes the OpenTelemetry Collector. The collector will forward the data to our APM Server in Elastic Cloud. To achieve this, we need some custom configuration. The GitHub repo (the official Elastic fork of the OTel demo) includes the Elastic specific configuration and is already cloned to your machine. You can find the configuration file called values.yaml on your machine. Go to the directory and look at the content of the file, you don't need to change anything.

cd ~/workshop/opentelemetry-demo/kubernetes/elastic-helm

cat values.yaml

Note that the collector is configured to use the Kubernetes secret we created in step 1.

Deploy the demo using helm install and pass in the custom values.yaml file

helm install -f values.yaml my-otel-demo open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo --version 0.23.0

List all the running pods to make sure that the application is installed successfully, it can take a few minutes for all the pods to become ready

kubectl get pods

You should see all the OpenTelemetry demo pods in addition to an instance of the OpenTelemetry Collector:

NAME                                                  READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE

my-otel-demo-accountingservice-bc4446d4b-x646b        1/1     Running   0          4m29s

my-otel-demo-adservice-5f96b995d6-sj289               1/1     Running   0          4m29s

my-otel-demo-cartservice-7fd55475cf-fqmm5             1/1     Running   0          4m30s

my-otel-demo-checkoutservice-56f8467c89-w56z5         1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-currencyservice-848cd7bbd5-gcmjd         1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-emailservice-6c449dc86f-k5v6q            1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-featureflagservice-84bcd65fdc-mj7w6      1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-ffspostgres-58dd9bdcd4-mpc7h             1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-frauddetectionservice-7946b5cdb8-m8pkq   1/1     Running   0          4m29s

my-otel-demo-frontend-77d6884f68-lfd68                1/1     Running   0          4m30s

my-otel-demo-frontendproxy-5c84b4f5bc-8zlcq           1/1     Running   0          4m30s

my-otel-demo-kafka-6cf57b7f77-pmrz4                   1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-loadgenerator-6684fc8df-qw2kr            1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-otelcol-74cdfc7b9b-gb9sx                 1/1     Running   0          4m30s

my-otel-demo-paymentservice-5fd857dd66-l6k6m          1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-productcatalogservice-5c5f66878f-wqbm9   1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-quoteservice-7dd66b686-gld5t             1/1     Running   0          4m31s

my-otel-demo-recommendationservice-5f47f89c6d-g86kn   1/1     Running   0          4m29s

my-otel-demo-redis-7db54d564c-db8vn                   1/1     Running   0          4m30s

my-otel-demo-shippingservice-6c96ff7bb9-574tx         1/1     Running   0          4m31s

To access the frontend of the OpenTelemetry demo application, you need to port-forward the frontend-proxy service. Open a new terminal tab (the command will run in the foreground and will occupy the terminal session) and start the port-forwarding

kubectl port-forward svc/my-otel-demo-frontendproxy 8080:8080 --address=0.0.0.0

There are two ways to access the frontend of the application:

Option 1: In Strigo

Option 2: In your local browser

When the application is up and running, it will send data to the OpenTelemetry Collector which forwards this data to the Elastic APM Server running inside the Integrations Server in your Elastic Cloud deployment. To make sure data is coming in, navigate to Kibana and select Observability > APM > Services. You'll see a list of all the different services. Select Service Map on top to switch to the real-time visual representation of all the instrumented services interacting with each other. This map is generated automatically based on all the APM data coming in.

If you don't see any services, refer to the troubleshooting section below, as you'll likely have a misconfiguration.