Chainguard Container for aws-otel-collector-fips

Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector for sending data from EKS clusters to AWS monitoring services like CloudWatch and X-Ray.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/aws-otel-collector-fips:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The Chainguard aws-otel-collector image is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the upstream AWS OpenTelemetry Collector image.

FIPS support

For more information on FIPS support in Chainguard container images, please see: FIPS-enabled Chainguard Containers on Chainguard Academy.

Prerequisites

• Authenticated with AWS EKS cluster
• IAM role with permissions for the AWS services you plan to use

Below is an example using eksctl to create an IAM service account with the necessary permissions for CloudWatch and X-Ray integration:

kubectl create namespace otel-system
eksctl create iamserviceaccount \
    --name aws-otel-collector \
    --namespace otel-system \
    --cluster MY-CLUSTER-NAME \
    --region MY-AWS-REGION \
    --attach-policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/CloudWatchAgentServerPolicy \
    --attach-policy-arn arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AWSXRayDaemonWriteAccess \
    --approve

• For detailed IAM permission requirements, see the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry permissions documentation

Getting Started

Install with Helm

The recommended method for deploying the aws-otel-collector with the Chainguard image is using the official ADOT Helm chart. This example demonstrates deployment:

cat > values.yaml <<EOF
image:
  repository: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/aws-otel-collector-fips
  tag: latest

clusterName: MY-CLUSTER-NAME

serviceAccount:
    create: false
    name: aws-otel-collector
EOF

Deploy the collector:

# Add the Helm repository
helm repo add snowplow-devops https://snowplow-devops.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

# Install the chart
helm install aws-otel-collector snowplow-devops/aws-otel-collector \
    --namespace otel-system \
    -f values.yaml

Once installation completes, validate aws-otel-collector is running:

kubectl get pods -n otel-system
kubectl get daemonset -n otel-system

The collector will automatically start collecting cluster metrics and sending them to CloudWatch Container Insights.

Install as an EKS Add-on

EKS allows you to install the ADOT collector as an EKS add-on. For complete instructions on how you can do this, refer to the ADOT EKS add-on documentation.

If you've chosen this installation method, be aware that you cannot specify a custom image while installing as an EKS add-on. You'll need to patch the aws-otel-collector DaemonSet to use the Chainguard image, and this is a step you'll need to repeat each time that you re-deploy or upgrade the version using EKS add-ons.

Documentation and Resources

• AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry Documentation
• Container Insights Setup Guide
• ADOT Collector Configuration Reference
• OpenTelemetry Collector Documentation

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.