OpenTelemetry (OTel) is emerging as the standard for data ingestion since it delivers a vendor-agnostic way to ingest data across all telemetry signals. Elastic Observability is leading the OTel evolution with the following announcements:
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Native OTel Integrity: Elastic is now 100% OTel-native, retaining OTel data natively without requiring data translation This eliminates the need for SREs to handle tedious schema conversions and develop customized views. All Elastic Observability capabilities—such as entity discovery, entity-centric insights, APM, infrastructure monitoring, and AI-driven issue analysis— now seamlessly work with native OTel data.
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Powerful end to end OTel based Kubernetes observability with Elastic Distributions of OpenTelemetry (EDOT): Elastic now supports EDOT deployment and management on Kubernetes via the OTel Operator, enabling streamlined EDOT collector deployment, application auto-instrumentation, and lifecycle management. With out-of-the-box OTel-based Kubernetes integration and dashboards, SREs gain instant, real-time visibility into cluster and application metrics, logs, and traces—with no manual configuration needed.
For organizations, it signals our commitment to open standards, streamlined data collection, and delivering insights from native OpenTelemetry data. Bring the power of Elastic Observability to your Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry deployments for maximum visibility and performance.
Fully native OTel architecture with in-depth data analysis
Elastic’s OpenTelemetry-first architecture is 100% OTel-native, fully retaining the OTel data model, including OTel Semantic Conventions and Resource attributes, so your observability data remains in OpenTelemetry standards. OTel data in Elastic is also backward compatible with the Elastic Common Schema (ECS).
SREs now gain a holistic view of resources, as Elastic accurately identifies entities through OTel resource attributes. For example, in a Kubernetes environment, Elastic identifies containers, hosts, and services and connects these entities to logs, metrics, and traces.
Once OTel data is in Elastic’s scalable vector datastore, Elastic’s capabilities such as the AI Assistant, zero-config machine learning-based anomaly detection, pattern analysis, and latency correlation empower SREs to quickly analyze and pinpoint potential issues in production environments.
Kubernetes insights with Elastic Distributions of OpenTelemetry (EDOT)
EDOT reduces manual effort through automated onboarding and pre-configured dashboards. With EDOT and OpenTelemetry, Elastic makes Kubernetes monitoring straightforward and accessible for organizations of any size.
EDOT paired with Elasticsearch, enables storage for all signal types—logs, metrics, traces, and soon profiling—while maintaining essential resource attributes and semantic conventions.
Elastic’s OpenTelemetry-native solution enables customers to quickly extract insights from their data rather than manage complex infrastructure to ingest data. Elastic automates the deployment and configuration of observability components to deliver a user experience focused on ease and scalability, making it well-suited for large-scale environments and diverse industry needs.
Let’s take a look at how Elastic’s EDOT enables visibility into Kubernetes environments.
1. Simple 3-step OTel ingest with lifecycle management and auto-instrumentation
Elastic leverages the upstream OpenTelemetry Operator to automate its EDOT lifecycle management—including deployment, scaling, and updates—allowing customers to focus on visibility into their Kubernetes infrastructure and applications instead of their observability infrastructure for data collection.
The Operator integrates with the EDOT Collector and language SDKs to provide a consistent, vendor-agnostic experience. For instance, when customers deploy a new application, they don’t need to manually configure instrumentation for various languages; the OpenTelemetry Operator manages this through auto-instrumentation, as supported by the upstream OpenTelemetry project.
This integration simplifies observability by ensuring consistent application instrumentation across the Kubernetes environment. Elastic’s collaboration with the upstream OpenTelemetry project strengthens this automation, enabling users to benefit from the latest updates and improvements in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem. By relying on open source tools like the OpenTelemetry Operator, Elastic ensures that its solutions stay aligned with the latest advancements in the OpenTelemetry project, reinforcing its commitment to open standards and community-driven development.
The diagram above shows how the operator can deploy multiple OTel collectors, helping SREs deploy individual EDOT Collectors for specific applications and infrastructure. This configuration improves availability for OTel ingest and the telemetry is sent directly to Elasticsearch servers via OTLP.
Check out our recent blog on how to set this up.
2. Out-of-the-box OTel-based Kubernetes integration with dashboards
Elastic delivers an OTel-based Kubernetes configuration for the OTel collector by packaging all necessary receivers, processors, and configurations for Kubernetes observability. This enables users to automatically collect, process, and analyze Kubernetes metrics, logs, and traces without the need to configure each component individually.
The OpenTelemetry Kubernetes Collector components provide essential building blocks, including receivers like the Kubernetes Receiver for cluster metrics, Kubeletstats Receiver for detailed node and container metrics, along with processors for data transformation and enrichment. By packaging these components, Elastic offers a turnkey solution that simplifies Kubernetes observability and eliminates the need for users to set up and configure individual collectors or processors.
This pre-packaged approach, which includes OTel-native Kibana assets such as dashboards, allows users to focus on analyzing their observability data rather than managing configuration details. Elastic’s Unified OpenTelemetry Experience ensures that users can harness OpenTelemetry’s full potential without needing deep expertise. Whether you’re monitoring resource usage, container health, or API server metrics, users gain comprehensive observability through EDOT.
For more details on OpenTelemetry Kubernetes Collector components, visit OpenTelemetry Collector Components.
3. Streamlined ingest architecture with OTel data and Elasticsearch
Elastic’s ingest architecture minimizes infrastructure overhead by enabling users to forward trace data directly into Elasticsearch with the EDOT Collector, removing the need for the Elastic APM server. This approach:
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Reduces the costs and complexity associated with maintaining additional infrastructure, allowing users to deploy, scale, and manage their observability solutions with fewer resources.
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Allows all OTel data, metrics, logs, and traces to be ingested and stored in Elastic’s singular vector database store enabling further analysis with Elastic’s AI-driven capabilities.
SREs can now reduce operational burdens while also gaining high performance analytics and observability insights provided by Elastic.
Elastic’s ongoing commitment to open source and OpenTelemetry
With Elasticsearch fully open source once again under the AGPL license, this change reinforces our deep commitment to open standards and the open source community. This aligns with Elastic’s OpenTelemetry-first approach to observability, where Elastic Distributions of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) streamline OTel ingestion and schema auto-detection, providing real-time insights for Kubernetes and application telemetry.
As users increasingly adopt OTel as their schema and data collection architecture for observability, Elastic’s Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT), currently in tech preview, enhances standard OpenTelemetry capabilities and improves troubleshooting while also serving as a commercially supported OTel distribution. EDOT, together with Elastic’s recent contributions of the Elastic Profiling Agent and Elastic Common Schema (ECS) to OpenTelemetry, reinforces Elastic’s commitment to establishing OpenTelemetry as the industry standard.
Customers can now embrace open standards and enjoy the advantages of an open, extensible platform that integrates seamlessly with their environment. End result? Reduced costs, greater visibility, and vendor independence.
Getting hands-on with Elastic Observability and EDOT
Ready to try out the OTel Operator with EDOT collector and SDKs to see how Elastic utilizes ingested OTel data in APM, Discover, Analysis, and out-of-the-box dashboards?
If you have your own application and want to configure EDOT the application with auto-instrumentation, read the following blogs on Go, Java, PHP, Python