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Nebius Observability Agent for Kubernetes can receive traces from applications in your Managed Service for Kubernetes® clusters via OTLP and forward them to Nebius AI Cloud. You can then view the traces in Grafana® using the Tempo data source.

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Prerequisites

  1. Install and configure Nebius AI Cloud CLI.
  2. If you don’t have a service account for observability services, create one.
  3. Make sure that the service account is in a group that has at least the viewer role within your tenant; for example, the default viewers group. You can check this in the Administration → IAM section of the web console. If the service account is not in the required group, click icon → Add to group, and select viewers.
  4. Issue a static key for the service account using the following command: 
    nebius iam static-key issue \
  --name <name_for_the_key> \
  --account-service-account-id <service_account_ID> \
  --service=OBSERVABILITY
    Copy the value of the static key from the token parameter of the response. You will need it on later steps.

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Enable trace collection

To collect traces from your Managed Service for Kubernetes cluster, enable traces in the Nebius Observability Agent for Kubernetes:
  1. Create or update your values.yaml file: 
    config:
  traces:
    enabled: true
  2. Install or upgrade the Nebius Observability Agent for Kubernetes: 
    helm upgrade --install nebius-observability-agent oci://cr.nebius.cloud/observability/public/nebius-observability-agent-helm \
  --version $(curl https://nebius-observability-agent.storage.eu-north1.nebius.cloud/nebius-observability-agent-helm/latest-release) \
  --namespace observability --create-namespace \
  --values values.yaml
For more details on the agent configuration, see Nebius Observability Agent for Kubernetes.

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Send traces from your application

When traces are enabled, the Nebius Observability Agent for Kubernetes exposes an OTLP endpoint for receiving traces: 
nebius-observability-agent.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local:4317
Where <namespace> is the namespace where the agent is installed (default: observability).

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Configure your application

Configure your application to send traces to the OTLP endpoint using OpenTelemetry SDK and OTLP exporter for your programming language: You can also find instrumentation libraries for your framework in the OpenTelemetry Registry. For applications that support OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation, you can configure the OTLP endpoint using environment variables in your Managed Service for Kubernetes deployment: 
env:
  - name: OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT
    value: "http://nebius-observability-agent.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local:4317"
  - name: OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL
    value: "grpc"
Replace <namespace> with the namespace where the Nebius Observability Agent for Kubernetes is installed.

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View traces

After configuring trace collection, you can view the traces in Grafana. For instructions on how to connect and explore traces, see How to view traces in Grafana®.

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See also