(Optional) Observability with Dapr using OpenTelemetry

In this exercise, you will deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector to our new AKS cluster and configure Dapr to send telemetry to the vendor agnostic collector implementation. The collector will be configured to send telemetry to an Application Insights resource that you will create within our existing Azure resource group.

Step 1: Create Application Insights resource

Run the following Azure CLI command to create the Application Insights resource in Azure.

az monitor app-insights component create --app aks-dapr-workshop-java --location eastus --kind web -g rg-dapr-workshop-java --application-type web

You may receive a message to install the application-insights extension, if so please install the extension for this exercise.

After the command completes, the output from the command will contain a property called “instrumentationKey” that will contain a unique identifier you will need to copy and save for later.

Step 2: Configure OpenTelemetry Collector

Open the file called open-telemetry-collector-appinsights.yaml that’s located within the deploy folder.

Next, find the Instrumentation Key value you copied from the previous step and replace the <INSTRUMENTATION-KEY> placeholder with this value and save.

Apply this configuration to your AKS cluster using the following command:

kubectl apply -f deploy/open-telemetry-collector-appinsights.yaml

Step 3: Configure Dapr to send tracing to OpenTelemetry Collector

Next, you need to configure Dapr to send tracing information to our newly deployed OpenTelemetry Collector using the following configuration file.

Open the file called collector-config.yaml within the deploy folder and inspect the configuration. This file will instruct Dapr to send telemetry data to the otel-collector endpoint for distribution to all registered telemetry stores, in our case it’ll be Azure Application Insights.

apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
kind: Configuration
metadata:
  name: appconfig
  namespace: default
spec:
  tracing:
    samplingRate: "1"
    zipkin:
      endpointAddress: "http://otel-collector.default.svc.cluster.local:9411/api/v2/spans"

Apply this configuration to your AKS cluster using the following command:

kubectl apply -f collector-config.yaml

Step 4: Configure Java Deployments to use Dapr

The Java deployments that are currently running in AKS need to be configured to use the new appConfig configuration that was just applied.

Add the following annotation dapr.io/config: "appconfig" to each of the java deployments that will be participating sending tracing telemetry to the OpenTelemetry Collector endpoint.

TrafficControlService

Find the `trafficcontrolservice-deployment.yaml file created in the previous assignment and make sure the annotations look like below.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  ...
spec:
  ...
  template:
    metadata:
      ...
      annotations:
        dapr.io/enabled: "true"
        dapr.io/app-id: "trafficcontrolservice"
        dapr.io/app-port: "6000"
        dapr.io/config: "appconfig"

FineCollectionService

Find the `finecollectionservice-deployment.yaml file created in the previous assignment and make sure the annotations look like below.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  ...
spec:
  ...
  template:
    metadata:
      ...
      annotations:
        dapr.io/enabled: "true"
        dapr.io/app-id: "finecollectionservice"
        dapr.io/app-port: "6001"
        dapr.io/config: "appconfig"

Apply these two configurations to AKS using the following two commands.

kubectl apply -f deploy/trafficcontrolservice-deployment.yaml

kubectl apply -f deploy/finecollectionservice-deployment.yaml

Step 5: Verify telemetry in Application Insights

Open the Azure Portal and navigate to the Application Insights resource within your resource group.

Open the Application Insights blade and click on the Search button in the navigation and run query.

If configured correctly, tracing data should show up in the search results.

Find the Application Map feature within the lefthand navigation of the Application Insights blade and click to show the mapping of telemetry calls between services.

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