Documentation forSolarWinds Observability SaaS

Auto Instrumentation

The SWO K8s Collector allows you to deploy the OpenTelemetry Operator which can be used to auto-instrument applications with SolarWinds Observability SaaS APM.

Setting up

Step 1: Enable deployment of the operator

  1. Set the following option in values.yaml: operator.enable=true

Step 2: Ensure proper TLS Certificate management

The operator uses webhooks to instrument workloads. In Kubernetes, in order for the API server to communicate with the webhook component, the webhook requires a TLS certificate that the API server is configured to trust. There are a few different ways to generate/configure the required TLS certificate:

  • Deploy cert-manager as part of this chart.

    • Ensure there is no cert-manager instance already present in the cluster.

    • Set certmanager.enabled=true.

  • Deploy cert-manager separately and set certmanager.enabled to false.

  • You can provide your own Issuer by configuring the operator.admissionWebhooks.certManager.issuerRef value. You will need to specify the kind (Issuer or ClusterIssuer) and the name. This method also requires the installation of cert-manager.

  • You can use an automatically generated self-signed certificate by setting operator.admissionWebhooks.certManager.enabled to false and operator.admissionWebhooks.autoGenerateCert.enabled to true. Helm will create a self-signed cert and a secret for you.

  • You can use your own generated self-signed certificate by setting both operator.admissionWebhooks.certManager.enabled and operator.admissionWebhooks.autoGenerateCert.enabled to false. You should provide the necessary values to operator.admissionWebhooks.cert_file, operator.admissionWebhooks.key_file, and operator.admissionWebhooks.ca_file.

  • You can side-load custom webhooks and certificate by disabling operator.admissionWebhooks.create and operator.admissionWebhooks.certManager.enabled while setting your custom cert secret name in operator.admissionWebhooks.secretName.

Step 3: Proceed through the APM onboarding wizard

  1. In SolarWinds Observability SaaS, click Add Data at the top.

  2. Click the APM tab.

  3. Click language of application being instrumented to launch the Add Data wizard.

  4. Type a name for your service, and select the Kubernetes radio button.

  5. Follow the instructions in the Add Data wizard to complete the onboarding process.