Monitoring Kubernetes Clusters in EKS Fargate using Opentelemetry Collection Agents

This guide explains how to monitor serverless Kubernetes workloads on Amazon EKS Fargate using OpenTelemetry. You'll deploy an OpenTelemetry Collector as a sidecar to collect OTLP telemetry from your applications along with K8s-Infra Collection Agent for cluster-level telemetry collection and send it to SigNoz for end-to-end observability.

What is Serverless Kubernetes Monitoring with OpenTelemetry?

EKS Fargate runs Kubernetes Pods on serverless compute. Since there is no node access, DaemonSets and host mounts are not supported. To collect telemetry, an OpenTelemetry Collector runs as a sidecar inside each Pod you want to observe. Your app sends traces, metrics, and logs to the local sidecar via OTLP; the sidecar then forwards data to your SigNoz backend.

To learn how Fargate differs from node-based setups and what the sidecar collects, see the K8s Serverless Overview.

Prerequisites

• A SigNoz backend (SigNoz Cloud or self-hosted) to receive OpenTelemetry data
• An EKS cluster with Fargate profiles configured
• kubectl access to update your Deployment/Pod specs
• A Kubernetes ServiceAccount mapped to your workloads with sufficient RBAC permissions

How OpenTelemetry Monitoring Works on Fargate

On EKS Fargate, the OpenTelemetry Collector runs as a sidecar in your Pods:

1. Install the cluster-level components using k8s-infra (with DaemonSet disabled for Fargate)
2. Add an OpenTelemetry Collector sidecar to your application Pods
3. Your applications emit OTLP telemetry to the sidecar (localhost)
4. The sidecar enriches data with Kubernetes metadata and forwards it to SigNoz via OTLP
5. Explore metrics, logs, and traces in SigNoz

Step 1: Install Cluster Components (k8s-infra)

Install the k8s-infra Helm chart to enable cluster-level collection (e.g., Kubernetes objects, events). For Fargate, disable the DaemonSet otelAgent and keep otelDeployment if you need cluster metrics/events.

Follow the instructions in the K8s-Infra Installation Guide.

Step 2: Add the OpenTelemetry Sidecar to Your Pods

Deploy an OpenTelemetry Collector as a sidecar in each Pod that you want to monitor. The sidecar provides local OTLP endpoints and exports telemetry to SigNoz.

Follow the complete configuration in the K8s Serverless (EKS Fargate) - Install guide.

Step 3: What Telemetry Can You Collect?

Once deployed, the sidecar-centric approach on Fargate supports:

• Application traces, metrics, and logs via OTLP
• Kubelet metrics via API-server proxy using kubeletstats (when available)
• Kubernetes metadata enrichment via k8sattributes

For details and examples, see the Install and Configure guides.

Step 4: Configure Options and Best Practices

The sidecar and cluster setup can be tuned for your needs:

• Log collection on Fargate via AWS-managed log router (Fluent Bit) → ingest using Collector receivers like awscloudwatchreceiver
• Trace sampling and batching to manage volume and cost
• Resource detection and Kubernetes metadata enrichment
• Performance tuning: batch sizes, timeouts, resource limits

See the K8s Serverless (EKS Fargate) - Configure guide for step-by-step configurations, including CloudWatch ingestion.

Step 5: Multi-Environment and Multi-Cluster Setups

You can send telemetry from multiple EKS Fargate environments to a single SigNoz backend:

1. Deploy the sidecar in each environment
2. Set unique k8s.cluster.name values per environment
3. Point all sidecars to the same SigNoz OTLP endpoint

Refer to the K8s-Infra Installation Guide for multi-cluster considerations.

Step 6: Visualize Telemetry in SigNoz

After sending data to SigNoz, you can:

• Filter by k8s.cluster.name, k8s.namespace.name, and other Kubernetes attributes
• Build dashboards for per-environment, per-namespace, or per-service views
• Investigate traces and logs side-by-side for faster root cause analysis

Next Steps

1. K8s Serverless Overview
2. Install the sidecar on EKS Fargate
3. Configure Fargate log routing and Collector receivers