K8s Infra - Overview

Monitoring your Kubernetes cluster is essential for ensuring performance, stability, and reliability. The SigNoz K8s-Infra chart provides a comprehensive solution for collecting and analyzing metrics, logs, traces and events from your entire Kubernetes environment.

The K8s-Infra Helm chart primarily performs the following:

  • Tails and parses logs generated by containers in the Kubernetes cluster and sends them to SigNoz.
  • Gathers Traces from your Kubernetes Cluster generated by containers and sends them to SigNoz
  • Collects kubelet metrics and host metrics from each node in the Kubernetes cluster.
  • Gathers cluster-level metrics from the Kubernetes API server.
  • Acts as a gateway to send any incoming OTLP telemetry data to the SigNoz OtelCollector.

How it Works: The otelAgent and otelDeployment

To export Kubernetes signals, you can enable different receivers in the OpenTelemetry collector, which will send signals about your Kubernetes infrastructure to SigNoz. These OpenTelemetry collectors will act as agents that transmit signals about Kubernetes to SigNoz. The k8s-infra Helm chart deploys two essential OpenTelemetry collector components to ensure complete observability of your Kubernetes cluster.

otel instances in k8s-infra monitoring
k8s-infra chart

otelAgent

otelAgent is deployed as a DaemonSet, meaning an instance of the otelAgent runs on every node in your cluster. Its main task is to collect node-level and pod-level data, including:

  • Host Metrics: CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, and network statistics from each node.
  • Kubelet Metrics: Data from the Kubelet API on each node, such as pod and container resource utilization.
  • Container Logs: Tailing and parsing logs generated by the containers running on the node.
  • Collect Traces: Traces from the application will also be collected generated by containers on node.

otelDeployment

The otelDeployment collector is set up to gather cluster metrics and events by default.

  • Cluster-level Metrics: Information about Kubernetes objects such as Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, and Jobs.
  • Kubernetes Events: Significant events within the cluster, useful for troubleshooting and auditing.
  • Custom Metrics: It can be configured to collect metrics from other services in the cluster, like Redis or PostgreSQL.
  • Prometheus Scraping: Metrics can also be scraped using pod annotations.

The otelAgent collector is deployed as a daemonset, which can lead to duplicate metrics if the same component runs on multiple nodes and metrics are collected from each node. The otelDeployment collector resolves this issue by collecting metrics at the cluster level instead of from individual nodes.

Next Steps

Last updated: July 22, 2025

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