opentelemetry-helm-charts VS tracetest-nomad

Refer to the official documentation for the Helm chart for comprehensive instructions and configuration options: OpenTelemetry Helm Charts Documentation.

In my latest Nomadification Project (TM), I got the OpenTelemetry Demo App to run on Nomad (with HashiQube, of course). To do this, I used the OpenTelemetry Demo App Helm Chart as my guide. In doing this, and other Nomadifications, I realized that I’ve never gone through the process of explaining the conversion process from Kubernetes manifests to Nomad jobspecs.

Y’all...I’m so excited, because I finally got to work on an item on my tech bucket list. Last week, I began the process of translating OpenTelemetry (OTel) Demo App’s Helm Charts to HashiCorp Nomad job specs.

After creating a Kubernetes cluster, we needed to create a Kubernetes resource before we could apply the Helm chart to install the OpenTelemetry demo app. The Demo App’s Helm Chart deploys an OpenTelemetry Collector. We wanted to configure the Collector to send OTel data to Lightstep. To do so, you need to add a Lightstep Access Token, which is stored as a Kubernetes secret.

Deploy the OpenTelemetry Demo App using the OpenTelemetry Demo Helm Chart

Now let's dive right in and figure out how to use the Helm chart provided by OpenTelemetry.

Tracetest came out in May 2022, and I first got my hands on Tracetest back in June 2022, so it was still pretty fresh! At the time, it integrated only with Jaeger. More specifically, it used the Jaeger API to pull OTel Traces from Jaeger to register them into Tracetest. You then used the UI to create trace-based tests.

Ever since I started exploring Nomad, one of the things that I’ve enjoyed doing is taking Docker Compose files and Kubernetes manifests, and translating them into HashiCorp Nomad jobspec. I did it for Temporal back in March 2022, and also for an early version of Tracetest, back in the summer of 2022.