Ingesting Open Telemetry Data

How OpenTelemetry integration works

This guide walks you through setting up the OpenTelemetry Collector in your Kubernetes environment and configuring it to send telemetry data to Statsig using the official otlphttp exporter.

✅ Prerequisites

• A running Kubernetes cluster (e.g., GKE, EKS, Minikube, etc.)
• Helm installed, or another mechanism to apply helm charts to your cluster, like ArgoCD
• API Access to a Statsig project with a Server SDK Secret Key
• Optional: kubectl configured and connected to the cluster, for validating and debugging setup

1. Setup OpenTelemetry Collector on Kubernetes

The recommended setup follows the official OpenTelemetry Kubernetes guide to install the OpenTelemetry Collector in both DaemonSet and Deployment modes using the official Helm chart. Tested values.yaml files for both deployment modes are available in Step 3.

📘 Official Guide:

Why both?

• DaemonSet Collector: Runs one instance per node to collect host-level telemetry (e.g., logs, pod and node metrics).
• Deployment Collector: Runs one instance per cluster to gather telemetry related to the cluster as a whole.

• Minimum for scraping logs:
  • Filelog Receiver
  • Kubernetes Attributes Processor
• Minimum for scraping kubernetes metrics
  • KubeletStats Receiver
  • Kubernetes Cluster Receiver
• Minimum for metrics about Otel Collector itself
  • OTLP Receiver for scraping internal metrics (alternatively scraped through prometheus receiver)

2. Configure exporting telemetry to Statsig with OTLP HTTP Exporter

Statsig supports receiving OTLP-formatted, JSON-encoded telemetry at the endpoint https://api.statsig.com/otlp. The OpenTelemetry Collector supports sending telemetry to the Statsig endpoint using the official otlphttp exporter.

Authentication

Example Exporter Config

exporters:
  otlphttp:
    endpoint: https://api.statsig.com/otlp
    encoding: json
    headers:
      statsig-api-key: ${env:STATSIG_SERVER_SDK_SECRET}

3. Example Helm Chart Values for a quick and correct setup

The following two complete and tested values.yaml configurations work with the OpenTelemetry Helm charts:

🔗 Deployment Collector

🔗 DaemonSet Collector

Use them with the Helm chart version 0.75.1 like this:

helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
helm repo update

# Install Deployment Collector
helm install otel-deployment open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector \
  --version 0.75.1 \
  -f values-gateway.yaml -n otel --create-namespace

# Install DaemonSet Collector
helm install otel-daemonset open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector \
  --version 0.75.1 \
  -f values-agent.yaml -n otel

4. Verify the Setup

Check that all pods are running:

kubectl get pods -n otel

Check logs for a specific collector pod and confirm no errors are reported:

kubectl logs -n otel $pod_name

5. Explore

🔗 Resources

• OpenTelemetry Collector Documentation
• Important Concepts for Kubernetes
• Helm Chart Reference
• Collector Configuration Reference
• OTLP Protocol Specification