Linkerd

Linkerd Integration in Dash0

Linkerd is an open-source service mesh designed for Kubernetes and cloud-native environments.
It provides security, observability, and reliability by seamlessly adding features like zero-config mutual TLS, dynamic request routing, and real-time telemetry.

This Dash0 integration enables users to visualize Linkerd’s telemetry data within their organization, providing insights into service health, traffic patterns, and latency without modifying their existing Linkerd deployment.

For more information, visit the Linkerd website.

Use Cases

Gain real-time visibility into your Linkerd-powered Kubernetes deployments with this integration:

• Service Health Monitoring: Track error rates, durations, requests across your service mesh
• Traffic Observability: Analyze service-to-service communication patterns and identify potential bottlenecks.
• Performance Insights: Leverage real-time metrics to detect issues and optimize service reliability.

Overview

Linkerd provides built-in telemetry and observability features, capturing metrics for service-to-service communication, proxy behavior, and control plane operations.
This integration enables users to forward Linkerd telemetry to Dash0 using the OpenTelemetry Collector.

For more details, refer to the Linkerd Documentation.

Configure

Collecting Metrics

Step 1: Create Dash0 Authorization Secret

Before deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector, create a secret in the monitoring namespace to store your Dash0 Authorization Token:

This secret allows the OpenTelemetry Collector to authenticate with Dash0 and send telemetry data.

Step 2: Deploy OpenTelemetry Collector

To scrape Linkerd metrics and send them to Dash0, deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector using Helm:

The content of the values.yaml file:

Step 3: Scraping Linkerd Metrics

The OpenTelemetry Collector is configured to scrape Linkerd control plane and proxy metrics using Prometheus.
The configuration follows the official Linkerd Prometheus scrape settings.

Metrics collected include:

• Linkerd control plane metrics (e.g., success rates, request volumes)
• Linkerd proxy metrics (e.g., latencies, retries, errors)
• Service mirror metrics (for multi-cluster setups)

Collecting Traces

To collect distributed traces with Linkerd and OpenTelemetry, you need to install and configure the Jaeger extension. Linkerd supports OpenTelemetry for trace collection, allowing you to forward trace data to an OpenTelemetry Collector. Note: That you need at least version edge-25.1.3 for this to work

Installing the Jaeger Extension

First, we need to configure the jaeger extension for Linkerd. Create a file jaeger-linkerd.yaml.

Next, install the Jaeger extension for Linkerd with the file created above:

This installs the necessary components for Linkerd to forward traces to an OpenTelemetry collector.

Enabling Tracing on Services

Each service that needs to forward trace information must include the following annotation in its pod template spec:

Replace <proxy-service-name> with the name of your service prefixed with linkerd-proxy, e.g. linkerd-proxy-voting.

Restarting Pods

Once the configuration is applied, restart your application pods to ensure they pick up the new tracing configuration:

After completing these steps, you should start seeing Linkerd traces in Dash0.

For more details, refer to the Linkerd Telemetry Documentation.