I’ve been having a lot of fun learning about Kubernetes and Observability. I set myself an interesting challenge: could I streamline the deployment process for the open-source OTel-Demo application alongside the Splunk OpenTelemetry collector to make it both simple and efficient?
Keep in mind, I’m not a developer. Since the world of Kubernetes (K8s) is largely developer focused I knew this would be a challenge for me to learn some new tricks.
I also wanted leverage the cheapest & smallest hardware I could run this demo application on, so anyone could simply follow this Lantern Article and quickly deploy a Kubernetes application that’s been instrumented for Open Telemetry, and the Splunk OTel Collector all without knowing how to write any code.
For hardware I selected the Raspberry Pi 5, on this PI we'll leverage MicroK8s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution, and Helm to deploy a demo application that streams critical metrics, traces, and logs to Splunk Observability Cloud.
To deploy this demo, you simply need to follow the step by step instructions in this Lantern Article.
This Lantern Article will walk you through setting up your Raspberry Pi 5, installing MicroK8s, and deploying a demo application using some YAML values files I have stored on my GitHub repository to quickly get started with Splunk Observability Cloud. These YAML files allow the OTel-Demo application to be setup with the Splunk OTel-Collector making it easier for you to deploy and get instant results. No changes to the source code or learning how to change any settings in the demo applications.
If you already have a Linux host that is setup for Kubernetes, simply skip down to Step 3 in the Lantern Article, and the deploy the Helm charts, just pay close attention to the YAML values files I have created for those Helm charts, as they do all the heavy lifting to make sure its deployed with the proper configuration to demo Splunk Observability Cloud.
If you successfully deploy it, let me know by commenting below!
