Telemetry Collector Deployment Guide

Scope: DevOps Guild, Observability Guild, and operators enabling the StellaOps telemetry pipeline (DEVOPS-OBS-50-001 / DEVOPS-OBS-50-003).

This guide describes how to deploy the default OpenTelemetry Collector packaged with Stella Ops, validate its ingest endpoints, and prepare an offline-ready bundle for air-gapped environments.

1. Overview

The collector terminates OTLP traffic from Stella Ops services and exports metrics, traces, and logs.

Endpoint	Purpose	TLS	Authentication
`:4317`	OTLP gRPC ingest	mTLS	Client certificate issued by collector CA
`:4318`	OTLP HTTP ingest	mTLS	Client certificate issued by collector CA
`:9464`	Prometheus scrape	mTLS	Same client certificate
`:13133`	Health check	mTLS	Same client certificate
`:1777`	pprof diagnostics	mTLS	Same client certificate

The default configuration lives at deploy/telemetry/otel-collector-config.yaml and mirrors the Helm values in the stellaops chart.

2. Local validation (Compose)

# 1. Generate dev certificates (CA + collector + client)
./ops/devops/telemetry/generate_dev_tls.sh

# 2. Start the collector overlay
cd deploy/compose
docker compose -f docker-compose.telemetry.yaml up -d

# 3. Start the storage overlay (Prometheus, Tempo, Loki)
docker compose -f docker-compose.telemetry-storage.yaml up -d

# 4. Run the smoke test (OTLP HTTP)
python ../../ops/devops/telemetry/smoke_otel_collector.py --host localhost

The smoke test posts sample traces, metrics, and logs and verifies that the collector increments the otelcol_receiver_accepted_* counters exposed via the Prometheus exporter. The storage overlay gives you a local Prometheus/Tempo/Loki stack to confirm end-to-end wiring. The same client certificate can be used by local services to weave traces together. See Telemetry Storage Deployment for the storage configuration guidelines used in staging/production.

3. Kubernetes deployment

Enable the collector in Helm by setting the following values (example shown for the dev profile):

telemetry:
  collector:
    enabled: true
    defaultTenant: <tenant>
    tls:
      secretName: stellaops-otel-tls-<env>

Provide a Kubernetes secret named stellaops-otel-tls-<env> (for staging: stellaops-otel-tls-stage) with the keys tls.crt, tls.key, and ca.crt. The secret must contain the collector certificate, private key, and issuing CA respectively. Example:

kubectl create secret generic stellaops-otel-tls-stage \
  --from-file=tls.crt=collector.crt \
  --from-file=tls.key=collector.key \
  --from-file=ca.crt=ca.crt

Helm renders the collector deployment, service, and config map automatically:

helm upgrade --install stellaops deploy/helm/stellaops -f deploy/helm/stellaops/values-dev.yaml

Update client workloads to trust ca.crt and present client certificates that chain back to the same CA.

4. Offline packaging (DEVOPS-OBS-50-003)

Use the packaging helper to produce a tarball that can be mirrored inside the Offline Kit or air-gapped sites:

python ops/devops/telemetry/package_offline_bundle.py --output out/telemetry/telemetry-bundle.tar.gz

The script gathers:

deploy/telemetry/README.md
Collector configuration (deploy/telemetry/otel-collector-config.yaml and Helm copy)
Helm template/values for the collector
Compose overlay (deploy/compose/docker-compose.telemetry.yaml)

The tarball ships with a .sha256 checksum. To attach a Cosign signature, add --sign and provide COSIGN_KEY_REF/COSIGN_IDENTITY_TOKEN env vars (or use the --cosign-key flag).

Distribute the bundle alongside certificates generated by your PKI. For air-gapped installs, regenerate certificates inside the enclave and recreate the stellaops-otel-tls secret.

5. Operational checks

Health probes – kubectl exec into the collector pod and run curl -fsSk --cert client.crt --key client.key --cacert ca.crt https://127.0.0.1:13133/healthz.
Metrics scrape – confirm Prometheus ingests otelcol_receiver_accepted_* counters.
Trace correlation – ensure services propagate trace_id and tenant.id attributes; refer to docs/observability/observability.md for expected spans.
Certificate rotation – when rotating the CA, update the secret and restart the collector; roll out new client certificates before enabling require_client_certificate if staged.

deploy/telemetry/README.md – source configuration and local workflow.
ops/devops/telemetry/smoke_otel_collector.py – OTLP smoke test.
docs/observability/observability.md – metrics/traces/logs taxonomy.
docs/13_RELEASE_ENGINEERING_PLAYBOOK.md – release checklist for telemetry assets.

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