Chainguard Image for splunk-otel-collector-fips

Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector is a distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. It provides a unified way to receive, process, and export metric, trace, and log data for Splunk Observability Cloud

Chainguard Images are regularly-updated, minimal container images with low-to-zero CVEs.

Download this Image

This image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/splunk-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

splunk-otel-collector-fips is built using this guide https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector/blob/main/cmd/otelcol/fips/Dockerfile as reference to ensure compatiblity with projects running this version of the application as a docker image, with the following differences:

• Like all other Chainguard Images, splunk-otel-collector-fips features a stripped down, minimal design
• This base image comes with apk and BusyBox and reports as being a Chainguard image.
• It has few-to-zero CVEs
• It does not run as the root user

Most importantly, the splunk-otel-collector-fips image contains the OpenSSL FIPS Provider Module (CMVP #4282).

About FIPS Images

FIPS (short for Federal Information Processing Standards) are standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in accordance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and approved by the Secretary of Commerce. FIPS compliance ensures that cryptographic security services within applications meet strict security and integrity standards, and are implemented and configured correctly.

Chainguard offers a variety of language-specific FIPS Images configured out of the box for FIPS development in a given language. We also offer a number base FIPS images for specific applications, such as PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and nginx.

Be aware that if you run apk add to install a package onto a Chainguard FIPS Image, there's no guarantee that these packages will function properly; they may throw errors if the package has certain dependencies that aren't available in the image. Additionally, even if they do function properly there's no guarantee that added packages will use FIPS-validated cryptography.

Please refer to Chainguard's FIPS Commitment for more information.

Getting Started

Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector is a distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. It provides a unified way to receive, process, and export metric, trace, and log data for Splunk Observability Cloud. Here is an example setup of the collector to ingest metrics from a Redis server.

Requirements

1. Configuration for the OpenTelemetry Collector deployed with a configMap
2. Configuration for the Redis server deployed with a configMap

The following is an example otel-collector.yaml confguration file:

apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: otel-config
  namespace: splunk
data:
  otel-collector-config.yaml: |
    receivers:
      redis:
        endpoint: "localhost:6379"
        collection_interval: 10s
        password: $REDIS_PASSWORD
        metrics:
          redis.role:
            enabled: true
          redis.cmd.calls:
            enabled: true
    extensions:
      health_check:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:13133
      zpages:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:55679
    processors:
      batch:
    exporters:
      signalfx:
        access_token: "token"
        realm: "us0"
      debug:
        verbosity: detailed
    service:
      telemetry:
        metrics:
          address: ":8888"
      pipelines:
        metrics/sfx:
          receivers: [redis]
          processors: [batch]
          exporters: [signalfx]
        metrics/logging:
          receivers: [redis]
          processors: [batch]
          exporters: [debug]

More information can be found in the Otel collector examples folder.

To test out this image, deploy an otel-collector pod in a Kubernetes cluster:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: redis-otel-pod
  namespace: splunk
spec:
  serviceAccount: default
  containers:
    - name: redis-db
      image: redis:latest
      command: ["redis-server", "/etc/redis/redis.conf"]
      ports:
        - containerPort: 6379
        - containerPort: 6329
      volumeMounts:
        - name: redis-config
          mountPath: /etc/redis/redis.conf
          subPath: redis.conf

    - name: otelcollector
      image: ${local.parsed.registry}/${local.parsed.repo}:${local.parsed.pseudo_tag}
      args:
        - "--config=/etc/otel-collector-config.yaml"
        - "--set=service.telemetry.logs.level=debug"
      env:
        - name: SPLUNK_ACCESS_TOKEN
          value: "token"
        - name: SPLUNK_REALM
          value: "us0"
        - name: REDIS_PASSWORD
          value: "changeme"
      ports:
        - containerPort: 8088
          name: otel-http
        - containerPort: 8888
          name: otel-grpc
      volumeMounts:
        - name: otel-config
          mountPath: /etc/otel-collector-config.yaml
          subPath: otel-collector-config.yaml

  volumes:
    - name: otel-config
      configMap:
        name: otel-config
    - name: redis-config
      configMap:
        name: otel-config

Ensure that the container is up and running and ensure that the metric counts have been ingested by the collector

kubectl -n splunk logs redis-otel-pod -c otelcollector 2>&1 | \
  grep "Metrics" | head -n 1 | jq -R 'split(",") | \
  map(select(contains("\"metrics\":"))) | map(split(": ")[1] | tonumber) | .[0] > 10'

The test above is to validate that metrics, in the case from a redis container are been collected by the otel collector service.

Documentation and Resources

1. https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector - Main project repository
2. https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector/tree/main/examples - Deployment scenarios
3. https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector-chart - Helm chart
4. https://docs.splunk.com/observability/en/gdi/opentelemetry/opentelemetry.html

Contact Support

If you have a Zendesk account (typically set up for you by your Customer Success Manager) you can reach out to Chainguard's Customer Success team through our Zendesk portal.

What are Chainguard Images?

Chainguard Images are a collection of container images designed for security and minimalism.

Many Chainguard Images are distroless; they contain only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These images do not even contain a shell or package manager. Chainguard Images are built with Wolfi, our Linux undistro designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Images include:

• Minimal design, with no unnecessary software bloat
• Automated nightly builds to ensure Images are completely up-to-date and contain all available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs (software bills of materials) attesting the provenance of all artifacts within the Image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

-dev Variants

As mentioned previously, Chainguard’s distroless Images have no shell or package manager by default. This is great for security, but sometimes you need these things, especially in builder images. For those cases, most (but not all) Chainguard Images come paired with a -dev variant which does include a shell and package manager.

Although the -dev image variants have similar security features as their distroless versions, such as complete SBOMs and signatures, they feature additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. The general recommendation is to use the -dev variants only to build the application and then copy all application artifacts into a distroless image, which will result in a final container image that has a minimal attack surface and won’t allow package installations or logins.

That being said, it’s worth noting that -dev variants of Chainguard Images are completely fine to run in production environments. After all, the -dev variants are still more secure than many popular container images based on fully-featured operating systems such as Debian and Ubuntu since they carry less software, follow a more frequent patch cadence, and offer attestations for what they include.

Learn More

To better understand how to work with Chainguard Images, we encourage you to visit Chainguard Academy, our documentation and education platform.