Originally published on the HostingPodium Enterprise Engineering Blog.
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This guide details a production-grade deployment of OpenTelemetry tracing, Grafana Tempo storage, Loki log correlation, and Prometheus exemplars on Kubernetes. It includes configuration, scaling, and runbook procedures for reliable observability.
Scope and assumptions
This guide targets production clusters running Kubernetes 1.27+ on bare-metal or cloud VMs. All components are deployed as native Kubernetes objects; no external SaaS services are referenced. The reference implementation uses the OpenTelemetry Collector DaemonSet, Grafana Tempo for trace storage, Loki for log aggregation, and Prometheus with exemplars for latency SLOs. The guide assumes familiarity with Helm, kube-adm, and Linux kernel tuning.
End-to-end data flow
| Stage | Component | Key artifact |
|---|---|---|
| Instrumentation | OpenTelemetry SDK (Java, Go, Python) | Span context, trace ID, baggage |
| Export | OTel Collector (daemonset) | OTLP over gRPC, batch processor |
| Storage | Grafana Tempo (S3-compatible backend) | Trace blocks, index files |
| Log correlation | Loki (sidecar or fluent-bit) | Log lines with trace_id label |
| Metrics | Prometheus (scrape) | Exemplars attached to http_request_duration_seconds |
Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector as a DaemonSet
The collector runs on every node to avoid network hops for pod-local traffic. The manifest below uses the official otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib image, enables host networking for UDP receivers, and configures a tail-based sampler.
yaml
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### Related Enterprise Architecture & Benchmarks
- **Canonical Engineering Guide:** [OpenTelemetry Distributed Tracing with Grafana Tempo, Loki & Prometheus on Kubernetes](https://hostingpodium.com/blog/opentelemetry-distributed-tracing-grafana-tempo-loki-kubernetes/)
- **Managed Engineering Practice:** [24/7 Managed Infrastructure, Linux SRE & Observability](https://hostingpodium.com/our-services/server-hosting-administration/)
- **Infrastructure Benchmark Comparison:** [Hetzner Alternative: 24/7 Managed Bare Metal vs Unmanaged Hardware](https://hostingpodium.com/compare/hetzner-alternative/)
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