Prerequisites and compatibility for Kubernetes observability with Elastic OpenTelemetry

Before setting up observability for Kubernetes, make sure you have the following:

  • Elastic Stack (self-managed or Elastic Cloud) version 8.16.0 or higher, or an Elasticsearch Serverless project.

  • A Kubernetes version supported by the OpenTelemetry Operator. Refer to the operator's compatibility matrix for more details.

  • If you opt for automatic certificate generation and renewal on the OpenTelemetry Operator, install cert-manager in the Kubernetes cluster. By default, the operator uses a self-signed certificate and doesn't require cert-manager.

The minimum supported version of the Elastic Stack for OpenTelemetry-based monitoring on Kubernetes is 8.16.0. Different Elastic Stack releases support specific versions of the kube-stack Helm chart.

Use the values file and installation instructions for your deployment mode:

Deployment mode Values file Installation instructions
Direct ingestion into Elasticsearch kube-stack/values.yaml Deploy Elastic OpenTelemetry for Kubernetes observability
Elastic Cloud Managed OTLP Endpoint on Elastic Cloud Hosted kube-stack/managed_otlp/values.yaml Quickstart for Kubernetes on Elastic Cloud Hosted
Elastic Cloud Managed OTLP Endpoint on Serverless kube-stack/managed_otlp/values.yaml Quickstart for Kubernetes on Elastic Cloud Serverless
Important

For Elastic Stack 8.16.0, use the values file from the elastic/opentelemetry repository instead.

The latest supported kube-stack Helm chart version is 0.16.0.