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Istio OpenTelemetry ALS Integration

The Istio OpenTelemetry ALS (Access Log Service) integration enables the export of Istio access logs to an OpenTelemetry Collector.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-open-telemetry-readme.md]

Architecture and Setup

To facilitate the integration, an otel-collector backend must be deployed first.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-open-telemetry-readme.md] A standard deployment involves configuring the collector with an otlp receiver, which listens for telemetry data, typically via gRPC on port 4317, and using a logging exporter to output the received data to the standard output (stdout) for debugging or verification.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-open-telemetry-readme.md]

Once the backend is running, Istio must be configured to forward logs to it.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-open-telemetry-readme.md] This is achieved by applying an Istio Telemetry resource.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-open-telemetry-readme.md] The resource specifies the provider name (e.g., otel) under accessLogging, effectively instructing the Envoy proxies to send access log streams to the configured collector endpoint.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-open-telemetry-readme.md]

Verification

To verify that the integration is functioning, traffic needs to be generated within the mesh, typically by deploying sample services like fortio (a load generator) and httpbin and executing requests from one to the other.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-open-telemetry-readme.md] Successful transmission of Access Log Service (ALS) data can be confirmed by inspecting the logs of the otel-collector Pod.^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-open-telemetry-readme.md]

  • Istio
  • [[OpenTelemetry]]
  • [[Observability]]

Sources

^[400-devops-07-monitoring-and-observability-k8s-istio-samples-open-telemetry-readme.md]