Redirect istio tracing to OpenTelemetryCollector

Config
1

Hello! We’re happy users of istio 1.7 and we’re currently facing an issue where we try to redirect istio traces to a OpenTelemetryCollector in order to have more control over the flow of traces. We intend to send traces to Honeycomb and the cluster-local jaeger instance, since a lot of developers rely on the jaeger webinterface for inspecting traces while others are currently testing a Honeycomb trial. The OTC is running in a specific namespace since it’s being maintained by a team that doesn’t have permissions to edit istio configuration.

My current approach to solve this is to create a new service otc-redirect in istio-system that points an externalName to the name.namespace.svc.cluster.local name of the service maintained by the team in charge of OTC. Then I configure the zipkin address to point to the otc-redirect service.

However, upon applying these changes to the istio profile template via helm chart, I see no traces of the new zipkin address in the dumped istio profile, which I generate via istioctl profile dump > profile-dump-new.yaml. Traces still show up in the Jaeger UI, though.

What am I missing here?

Thanks!

2

Hint, If you installed OTC helmChart please check the zipkin port it enabled in values.yaml. (it is disabled by default!)

    collector:
        service:
          zipkin:
            port: 9411