Importing an Observability Cluster

The Platform Console can run a dedicated observability cluster that collects telemetry (metrics, logs, and traces) from your spoke clusters through OpenTelemetry. This guide covers the two import-time tasks:

1. Importing the observability cluster itself.
2. Enabling the OpenTelemetry feature on the spoke clusters you want to monitor.

For the full end-to-end setup — MinIO, the telemetry bucket, and the TelemetryStack — see OpenTelemetry Monitoring.

Import the Observability Cluster

Import the cluster as a spoke as you normally would (see Adding a Cluster). During the import flow, select the Observability Cluster cluster profile. This provisions the components required to receive and store telemetry from other clusters.

Enable the OpenTelemetry Feature on a Spoke Cluster

Once the observability cluster is ready, enable the OpenTelemetry feature on each spoke cluster you want it to monitor. There are two ways to do this.

Option A: During Cluster Import

When importing a new cluster, select the destination observability cluster from the Monitoring Cluster drop-down in the import flow. This automatically enables the OpenTelemetry feature on the new spoke and routes its telemetry to the chosen monitoring cluster.

Option B: On an Existing Spoke Cluster

1. Import the cluster as a spoke (if it is not already imported).

2. Install the Perses dashboards on the cluster:

   helm upgrade -i kubedb-perses-dashboards \
     oci://ghcr.io/appscode-charts/kubedb-perses-dashboards \
     -n monitoring --create-namespace \
     --version=v2026.4.27
   

3. Navigate to the cluster’s Observability feature set.

4. Enable the appscode-otel-stack feature.