deploy-otel-demo-alloy

This project helps you accelerate the process of standing up the OpenTelemetry Demo and Grafana Alloy, with Alloy shipping your OTel telemetry to your Grafana Cloud account.

This README page gives you the quick setup steps; the links further down give you more detail.

Quick setup steps

These steps are very brief by design. They will assume that you have solid background in a number of areas. Further areas of the documentation will help users learn each step in more detail.

Note that these are written for the Linux OS; we do not yet document how to run this on other operating systems.

Prerequisites

K8s cluster: I recommend at least the equivalent of 4 e2-medium machines.

CLIs: Git, Kubectl, Flux

Viewer: K9s, or whatever solution you like

Code: VSCode, or whatever solution you like

Fork, then clone, this repo

Cloning without forking won't work. Make your own fork, then clone your fork to your machine. Then cd into the top level directory.

Create a file called exports.env, with this content:

export GITHUB_USER=
export GITHUB_TOKEN=
export ALLOY_CLOUD_OTLP_URL=
export ALLOY_CLOUD_OTLP_USERNAME=
export ALLOY_CLOUD_OTLP_PASSSWORD_BASE64=

(Note that the .gitignore in this project should keep this file from being checked in, if you name it with a .env extension)

Fill in the values in exports.env

First 2: Fill in your GH username, and go get a "classic personal access token" from GH with all Repo permissions enabled; no other permissions needed.

Last 3: From your Grafana Cloud Portal, go into a stack, then into the OpenTelemetry section, and get your username, url, and auth token.

IMPORTANT: base64 encode your token

Before putting the Grafana Cloud OTel auth token into its place in the above exports, base64 encode it.

echo -n YOUR_TOKEN_HERE | base64

The output of that command is what you place into exports.env.

Run the 5 exports

Your choice:

• make exports.env executable and run it;
• copy/paste the export statements from exports.env to the command line;
• make them part of your environment setup in another way of your choosing.

Now run the project

You should now be good to run the following 2 commands, from the root directory of the project.

./pre-provision/pre-provision.sh

CURRENT=`pwd`; BASENAME=`basename "$CURRENT"`; \
flux bootstrap github \
    --context=$(kubectl config current-context) \
    --owner=${GITHUB_USER} \
    --repository=${BASENAME} \
    --branch=main \
    --path=clusters/staging

Sanity Check

Use k9s or the viewer of your choice, to see that Alloy comes up in the "collector" namespace, and the OTel Demo comes up in the "open-telemetry" namespace.

Go to your cloud account, and use the Explore Logs UI to see that logs are arriving from a number of the services in the OTel Demo.

Getting Started

Please see how-to-run page for more detailed instructions on running this project.

Further Learning

Please see the overview page for more detail on the overall project.