Kong Gateway Monitoring - Ship Traces and Logs to SigNoz

Overview

Kong Gateway is an open-source API gateway that routes and secures traffic to your upstream services. kong-plugin-signoz is a Kong plugin built by SigNoz that ships traces and logs from Kong to SigNoz with minimal configuration.

• Traces — the plugin delegates trace export to Kong's bundled OpenTelemetry plugin and enriches Kong's root request span before export.
• Logs — the plugin produces one structured OTLP log record per request and ships it over its own OTLP/HTTP pipeline.

Prerequisites

• A SigNoz Cloud or Self-Hosted workspace
• Kong Gateway 3.6+ (open-source or Enterprise)
• Access to every Kong node's filesystem (to install the plugin's Lua sources)

Setup

Step 1: Install the plugin

Install the plugin's Lua sources on every Kong node via LuaRocks (LuaRocks page):

luarocks install kong-plugin-signoz

For all available config fields, see the configuration reference.

luarocks install --server=https://luarocks.org/manifests/signoz kong-plugin-signoz

For other install routes (custom images, Kubernetes), see Kong's installation and distribution guide.

Step 2: Load the plugin in Kong

Add signoz to the loaded plugins in kong.conf (or via the KONG_PLUGINS environment variable) on every node:

plugins = bundled,signoz

Step 3: Enable Kong's tracer

The plugin enriches Kong's root request span before export, so Kong's tracer must be on. Set in kong.conf (or via environment variables):

tracing_instrumentations = all
tracing_sampling_rate    = 1.0

See Kong's tracing reference for the full list of values. Without these settings, Kong exports no spans. Logs still ship; only traces depend on the tracer.

Restart Kong to pick up both the new plugin and the tracer settings.

Step 4: Enable the plugin

Enable the plugin globally on the gateway via Kong's Admin API:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/plugins \
  --data "name=signoz" \
  --data "config.exporter.endpoint=https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443" \
  --data "config.exporter.key=<your-ingestion-key>" \
  --data "config.resource.service_name=kong" \
  --data "config.resource.deployment_environment=production" \
  --data "config.logs.instrumentations=access"

curl -X POST http://localhost:8001/plugins \
  --data "name=signoz" \
  --data "config.exporter.endpoint=http://<your-collector-host>:4318" \
  --data "config.resource.service_name=kong" \
  --data "config.resource.deployment_environment=production" \
  --data "config.logs.instrumentations=access"

Scope the plugin per-service, per-route, or per-consumer using Kong's Admin API. See Kong's Plugin entity docs for scoping syntax.

Step 5: Verify in SigNoz

Send a request through Kong:

curl -i http://localhost:8000/<your-route>

In SigNoz:

• Services view shows kong with traffic.
• Traces Explorer lists spans named kong with attributes kong.service.name, kong.route.name, and HTTP semconv fields.
• Logs Explorer lists one record per request with body "<METHOD> <path> <status> <duration>ms" and severity set by status class (2xx → INFO, 4xx → WARN, 5xx → ERROR).

If nothing arrives within 5 seconds, check Kong's error log for entries containing signoz. Exporter errors surface as queue signoz: (traces) and queue signoz:logs_access: (logs).

Next Steps

• Set up log-based alerts to get notified on error patterns in Kong access logs.
• Set up trace-based alerts on Kong latency or error rates.
• Create a dashboard to combine Kong traces and logs in a single view.

Get Help

If you need help with the steps in this topic, please reach out to us on SigNoz Community Slack.

If you are a SigNoz Cloud user, please use in product chat support located at the bottom right corner of your SigNoz instance or contact us at cloud-support@signoz.io.