OpenTelemetry Kong Gateway Integration

_format_version: "3.0"
_transform: true

plugins:
  - name: opentelemetry
    config:
      traces_endpoint: "https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/traces"
      logs_endpoint: "https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/logs"
      metrics:
        endpoint: "https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/metrics"
        push_interval: 10
        enable_bandwidth_metrics: true
        enable_latency_metrics: true
        enable_request_metrics: true
        enable_upstream_health_metrics: true
      headers:
        signoz-ingestion-key: "<your-ingestion-key>"
      resource_attributes:
        service.name: "<service_name>"
      queue:
        max_batch_size: 200
        max_coalescing_delay: 3

Verify these values:

• <region>: Your SigNoz Cloud region
• <your-ingestion-key>: Your SigNoz ingestion key
• <service_name>: The name of your service

Sync your state via Kong's Admin API:

deck gateway sync kong-state.yaml --kong-addr <YOUR-KONG-ADMIN-URL>

Apply a KongClusterPlugin to enable the plugin globally across all services managed by the Ingress Controller.

apiVersion: configuration.konghq.com/v1
kind: KongClusterPlugin
metadata:
  name: opentelemetry-global
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: kong
  labels:
    global: "true"
plugin: opentelemetry
config:
  traces_endpoint: "https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/traces"
  logs_endpoint: "https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/logs"
  metrics:
    endpoint: "https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443/v1/metrics"
    push_interval: 10
    enable_bandwidth_metrics: true
    enable_latency_metrics: true
    enable_request_metrics: true
    enable_upstream_health_metrics: true
  headers:
    signoz-ingestion-key: "<your-ingestion-key>"
  resource_attributes:
    service.name: "<service_name>"

Verify these values:

• <region>: Your SigNoz Cloud region
• <your-ingestion-key>: Your SigNoz ingestion key
• <service_name>: The name of your service

Apply the file to your cluster:

kubectl apply -f kong-plugin-otel.yaml

Kong instruments each proxied request as an OTel span with child spans for each phase:

• Proxy latency: time Kong spends routing the request before forwarding it upstream
• Plugin execution: time spent inside each enabled plugin (e.g. auth, rate-limiting)
• DNS resolution: upstream hostname lookup time
• Upstream latency: time waiting for the upstream service to respond

Each span carries standard HTTP attributes: http.method, http.url, http.host, http.scheme, http.flavor, and net.peer.ip.

Kong supports W3C TraceContext, B3/B3-single (Zipkin), Jaeger, OpenTracing, Datadog, AWS X-Ray, and GCP propagation formats. Existing distributed traces from upstream or downstream services pass through without extra configuration.

Requires Kong Gateway Enterprise v3.13+.

Kong pushes all metrics over OTLP on the push_interval you configure (default: 60 seconds, set to 10 in the example above for faster feedback). The enable_bandwidth_metrics, enable_latency_metrics, enable_request_metrics, and enable_upstream_health_metrics flags in the plugin config control which metric groups Kong collects.

Kong emits two categories of logs over OTLP:

• Access logs: one log record per proxied request. Each record includes the request method, URI, status code, response size, and latency.
• Runtime logs: internal Kong and plugin execution messages (errors, warnings, debug output).

Every log record includes:

• Timestamp, ObservedTimestamp, SeverityText, and SeverityNumber
• request.id to correlate logs to a specific request
• TraceID and SpanID when tracing is enabled, so you can jump from a log line to the corresponding trace in SigNoz

You no longer need a separate log forwarder like Fluent Bit to parse Kong access logs. The plugin handles formatting and delivery.