Automating collection infrastructure with Helm or Ansible

Automating the installation of the infrastructure used to collect telemetry is a critical piece of building a great observability platform. The tools to support this depend on the infrastructure you are deploying to. In this section, we will examine the installation of the OpenTelemetry Collector and Grafana Agent using the following tools:

• Helm is a tool for packaging and managing Kubernetes applications. A Helm chart contains all the configuration files for the various Kubernetes components needed for an application, and typically handles setting the variables for the application. We will be using Helm in a Kubernetes environment.
• Ansible is a tool for standardizing operations into repeatable playbooks. It uses simple YAML configuration files to define the actions to be taken and leverages OpenSSH to connect to the target servers on which the actions are to be taken. We’ll be using Ansible in a virtual or...